The primary skill in crafting Emacs is not the act of coding, but the art of exploration. This chapter introduces some essential utilities for exploring Emacs code. If you’re a seasoned Emacser, you may be well-acquainted with these already.

In order to write meaningful code, you must first understand the problem your code is solving. We will familiarise ourselves with the discipline of cross-stitch and the editor we are creating for it.

Finally, we will write a snippet or two of Elisp. You’ll learn how to experiment with Elisp in your editor. With each new construct, you’ll poke and prod at Emacs until you are sure of what it does. At the end, you’ll have a pretty good grounding.

Learning objectives

• Identify windows and buffers.

• Use keybindings.

• Use describe and Info to explore documentation.

• Use interactive commands.

• Call and write functions.

• Understand the role of the Emacs Lisp Interpreter.

• Model the interpreter’s environment.

• Experiment with the *scratch* buffer.

• Identify incorrect Emacs Lisp code.

• Reason through error messages.

• Load code on startup.