Lisp and Scheme are marvelous 60s-70s hippie acid-head languages. “Hey, let’s use a small set of primitives and treat code and data the same and we can run huge worlds with a tiny, recursive interpreter!”

By the time you get to Emacs though, many huge worlds have been built, and navigating the huge world(s) that small set of primitives has created can be…uh…daunting – both because of 1000s of people’s contributions and because of the weight of history (e.g. booleans are “predicates” – from calculus – thus all the “_p” names).

That said, at it’s core, it’s elegant and lovely.

https://preview.redd.it/g641rtwx502c1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1d6fe005a93830eb624d5fd0324ae97c84135f86

so my question is, Is it worth it?

It’s worth more than a bunch of other people’s opinions.

It’s sort of a silly question.

To customise emacs beyond clicking around in ‘customise’ you need to write elisp. If you learn little elisp then you can only customise it using other people’s code, if you learn a lot of it then you can write an mua.

You decide where you want to be on that spectrum.

Yes. It’s worth it.

If you’ve ever tweaked your Doom config, you’re already writing elisp. Going from setting options to writing new modes will certainly take time, but lisp is a language that builds on itself.

In fact, Emacs+elisp is one of the best systems for learning by doing. C-h f, C-h v, C-x C-e, etc will get you far. The built in tutorial is absolutely worth going thru, and understanding lisp will improve your understanding of other languages as well.

“i’m not a programmer by any means” what do you use Emacs for? (sincere question, I know non-programers use Emacs)

Actually learning elips itself is the reward.

If you’re sold on sticking with Emacs, then learning elisp will unquestionably pay dividends, and the more you learn the more you’ll be able to do (but you don’t need to understand everything in order to do anything).

and how exactly can i improve my emacs experience if i learned elisp?

That’s the thing – it’s up to you. The ability to “scratch any itch” is what elisp give you. That doesn’t mean any given thing is easy to do (although it might be) but, to a significant extent, if you can identify a problem then implementing a solution is also a possibility.

Elisp isn’t just a programming language it’s an execution environment and it doesn’t make a lot of sense to consider them separately.

For example the largest abstraction in elisp is the buffer. A lot of core language features revolve around and are greatly modified by the buffer. For example variable bindings can typically be overrides in buffer-local variables.

Furthermore there’s a lot of editor specifics that are interesting. Text properties are the least of which. Buffer narrowing is another. But what about… fields? Judicious use of fields limits where you can type into a buffer. Consider the customize user interface for example.

Basically emacs is a complete tui development environment.

Let me cite RMS to answer that:

The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success—programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn’t say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn’t do programming, weren’t scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.

source: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html

Programming in elisp is fun, too. Since it’s (typical for Lisp!) interactive programming features.

Lisp (and especially Emacs Lisp) isn’t harder than other languages. I’m not a professional programmer either, but I’ve dabbled in languages from BASIC to bash to PERL, JavaScript, and Python. In my experience, Elisp has been the easiest of all of them.

Once you wrap your head around how lists work in Lisp, it all comes together pretty quickly. And Emacs’s self-documenting nature makes learning it that much easier.

The syntax is more consistent than any other language I’ve come across. It’s lists all the way down.

Just do “C-h R eintro RET” and start learning. Do “M-x find-library RET” to read the code of your favorite package and figure out how it works.

It’s pretty tiny compared to a lot of languages considering that most of what you use it for is working with Emacs, which has a small number of intrinsic types like buffers, windows, frames, text properties etc.

Compared to being the kind of person who reads use-package like JSON and treats it like a declaration language, you will be light years ahead at configuration if you just know lists, quoting, alists, plists, and writing functions. Users who don’t go at least that far will be constantly shooting themselves in the foot and spending much more time with minor, novice level bugs that are completely obvious.

Emacs Lisp is probably one of my favorite and most used programming languages outside of work. Emacs is a very pleasant environment to program in, because it’s a Lisp image that you can poke and prod. I literally will do everyday math in Emacs Lisp now if I am at my computer.

Also, helpful tip: since Emacs Lisp is so old and LLMs are often based on old data, I find that tools like ChatGPT are very good at producing working Emacs Lisp.

This is helpful because I find that many Emacs functions and macros are not named in a way that is easy to search by.

How rewarding learning Elisp can be?

How rewarding learning anything is?

how exactly can i improve my emacs experience if i learned elisp?

You can program Emacs to do stuff you want it to do, the way you want it to do. It is like asking how can I improve my computer usage if I learn a programming language.

You need surprisingly little if you already have general lisp knowledge to actually be able to write your own configs. Hell, you don’t need any knowledge just work with it as if it’s some config file grammar. I started with doom and after a year or so took a step into vanilla Emacs. My Emacs config is exactly how I want it now. Don’t get me wrong it’s not life changing compared to Doom but if you have a weekend spare and you are feeling up the challenge, give it a shot.

In my experience, you don’t really need to know much elisp (if any) to be able to configure your editor unless you’re building your own plugin. Once you have a specific problem, you just Google and use Emacs internal docs.

That said, elisp has an interesting trait: variables are dynamic by default. It’s quite different from other languages so it may be amusing to learn more about (if you do find that interesting, check out PicoLisp)