Emacs Lisp is the extension language for the GNU Emacs text editor, and in fact, most of the functionality of Emacs is implemented using Emacs Lisp. Users generally customize Emacs' behavior by adding Emacs Lisp statements to their .emacs, or writing separate packages.
Emacs Lisp is the extension language for the GNU Emacs text editor, and in fact, most of the functionality of Emacs is implemented using Emacs Lisp. Users generally customize Emacs' behavior by adding Emacs Lisp statements to their .emacs file, or writing separate packages. A guide to learning Emacs Lisp for non-programmers can be found here.
Emacs Lisp differs from most other lisps in two main ways:
- It has special features for scanning and parsing text, as well as features for handling files, buffers, arrays, displays, and subprocesses. This is due to the fact that it is designed to be used in a text editor
- It uses primarily dynamic scope as opposed to lexical scope. This was done very intentionally, the reasons are well explained in the 1981 paper on Emacs. Lexical scope has been introduced only recently and, while not yet widely adopted, is expected to become increasingly important in future versions according to the manual.
