This guide is meant to be read in a browser with Emacs open alongside it.

Almost every code snippet within is meant to be written and executed in Emacs. Nevertheless, the guide contains interactive features such as evaluation step-throughs and reading guides that need a browser to run reliably.

You will craft a cross stitch pattern editor through a series of step-by-step tutorials, each building on the previous one. You’ll get the most out of them by starting from the beginning, but you can pick up any tutorial by copying its first code snippet.

No knowledge of Emacs Lisp is required — you will gain this as you go — but you should be somewhat familiar with the Emacs editor. If this is your first experience of Emacs, start off with the built in manual instead.

You can use any Emacs distribution to work through the tutorials. Setup instructions have been provided for basic Emacs and Doom.