Re: Some ideas with Emacs

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2019-11-29, at 10:05, Anonymous <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi, I'm a user and a fanatical fans for Emacs. I'd like to share a few ideas 
> for about Emacs Lisp.
> Emacs Lisp is powerful, it's undeniable.&nbsp;But when I studied Emacs Lisp, 
> I found that there were too few examples of function use in the 
> tutorial.&nbsp;Also when using Emacs Lisp for Emacs plugin development and 
> configuration,&nbsp;Sometimes you write your own plugins will affect the 
> configuration you write, so I'd like to make a few ideas for Emacs Lisp:
> First, suggest to add more examples of functions in the tutorial, most for 
> Emacs Lisp Reference Manual, which can lower the learning threshold.

I had a plan to write an intermediate book on Elisp, but Real Life™
intervened.  I still have the stuff I managed to write, and if I live
long enough, I'm going to get back to this project (the current plan is
late 2020 - I'm finishing work on another book now, which is long
overdue, and I cannot postpone it more because it is a joint work with
two other people).  Would you be interested?  What would you like to see
in such a book?  (The idea was - and is - to start approximately where
Robert Chassell's "Elisp Intro" ends.)

> Second, in developing the Emacs plugins, create a virtual environment, like 
> Python virtualenv, so that we can test the plugin in the virtual environment 
> so that we do not need to affect the configuration outside the virtual 
> environment. That's can implement plugin development environment and 
> configuration isolation.
>
> Although my suggestion may be a little trivial and even useless.&nbsp;But if 
> my suggestions can help beginners like me go further, I think it's worth it.

AFAIK, this is _far_ from trivial.  However, you can always start
a fresh Emacs instance with -Q.  For more advanced configs, you may
start a fresh Emacs instance with the config directory in /tmp or
whatever.  (Shameless plug: I blogged about it a few weeks ago, see
http://mbork.pl/2019-11-04_Starting_Emacs_with_custom_configuration_directory.)

Now that I think of it, we could even have an Emacs command to start
a fresh Emacs instance with a given file already loaded.  WDYT?

Hth,

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl