Emacs: A Paradigm Shift

Summary

Recently I read this beginners guide to extend Emacs. The guide is perfect for starting out with elisp and it shows a lot of care in teaching how to interact with Emacs. To me, the most important bit though is this one, from the section aptly named Emacs Wants You to Extend It. I haven’t written plugins for other editors extensively, but I can tell you this: emacs doesn’t just make deep customization available, but it actively encourages you to make an absolute customization messes masterpieces. Core editor functions aren’t just documented, but often include tidbits about “you probably want to see this other variable” or “here’s how you should use this”. Not only that, but emacs happily hands you functions shaped like nuclear warheads like advice-add (that let you override any function) that can absolutely obliterate your editor if you hold it the wrong way. Of course, this also grants you unlimited power. Remember that emacs is designed to be torn apart and rearranged. This is the core bit of the argument. Emacs, as a system, wants you to extend it and it gives you all the means to do so. This is in contrast with systems that can be extended through scripting and instead don’t give you all the means to do so! I think the tutorial is a fantastic example of doing things right. There is a well-thought example, a constructive approach where the solution grows to a full package. This is problematic. You may get the impression that extending Emacs is only possible if you do things right and that is definitely not true. To make my point I want to walk you through an example. I will show you how I used standard Emacs extension-points to extend org-mode to sort my reading lists automatically. What do I want? The behavior I want is that when I save an org file the entries are ordered automatically. I keep a timeline of the papers I am reading and it is annoying to keep them kind of ordered. This is the content of an example buffer. #+TITLE: My tematic reading list * Paper wh...