12 Facts About Emacs Lisp

Emacs Lisp is a dialect of the Lisp programming language used as a scripting language by Emacs .

Emacs Lisp is termed Elisp, although there is an older, unrelated Lisp dialect with that name.

Itself written in Emacs Lisp, Customize provides a set of preferences pages allowing the user to set options and preview their effect in the running Emacs session.

Emacs Lisp is most closely related to Maclisp, with some later influence from Common Lisp.

Emacs Lisp chose not to use it because of its comparatively poor performance on workstations, and he wanted to develop a dialect which he thought would be more easily optimized.

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However, Emacs Lisp provides many features for navigating and modifying buffer text at a sentence, paragraph, or higher syntactic level as defined by modes.

In Emacs Lisp, the editing area can be split into separate areas called windows, each displaying a different buffer.

Each set of optional features shipped with Emacs Lisp is implemented by a collection of Emacs Lisp code called a package or library.

In GNU Emacs Lisp, primitives are not available as external libraries; they are part of the Emacs Lisp executable.

In XEmacs Lisp, runtime loading of such primitives is possible, using the operating system's support for dynamic linking.

The standard Emacs Lisp code distributed with Emacs is loaded as bytecode, although the matching source files are usually provided for the user's reference as well.

Emacs Lisp is a Lisp-2 meaning that it has a function namespace which is separate from the namespace it uses for other variables.