It looks great. I have not read it to completion just yet, but merely scrolling through the document leaves me with a feeling that the author got tired and decided "this is a good stopping point."
To be fair, writing a book about Emacs is a Sisyphean effort by definition - this sea is a bottomless abyss of hackery abundance, and any meaningful effort to explain it is worth a celebration.
FergusArgyll•Jul 1, 2026
I have a silly little vibe coded extension where I can star certain HN commenters so I know who to look for in which threads (just puts a small symbol next to the username)
You are for emacs, happy to see you here... :)
anthk•Jul 2, 2026
The Emacs' bundled documentation on Elisp (both the intro and the rest) are pretty much complete enough.
On Elisp and multithreading/processing, well, just look at bordeaux-threads in Common Lisp where the support is not universal for Clisp. SBCL and ECL work, but...
hgp22•Jul 2, 2026
Love to see that Emacs can still capture the atention of new CS students.
aaptel•Jul 5, 2026
This is great! You should make a web version or add it to the wiki.
I started the Hacker's guide on the emacs wiki many years back. I think this doc was much needed.
4 Comments
I was having trouble accessing the Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet site (linked in headline) directly, so uploaded it here (link expires in 3 days):
https://temp.sh/CVzcQ/emacs-arch-thesis.pdf
To be fair, writing a book about Emacs is a Sisyphean effort by definition - this sea is a bottomless abyss of hackery abundance, and any meaningful effort to explain it is worth a celebration.
You are for emacs, happy to see you here... :)
On Elisp and multithreading/processing, well, just look at bordeaux-threads in Common Lisp where the support is not universal for Clisp. SBCL and ECL work, but...
I started the Hacker's guide on the emacs wiki many years back. I think this doc was much needed.