This is the first of a two part episode that discusses how to do basic customisation of Emacs.

This episode covers some basic elisp which is the language that you can extend and modify Emacs with.

I do have an entire section dedicated to teaching Emacs lisp. This is a quick intro solely for the purpose of doing basic customisations.

The H.264 version of the video for iOS devices is at http://archive.org/download/EmacsMovies/08.1-episode-customisation-1.mkv.

The main things which are covered are

1. A super fast overview of elisp - sexps and prefix notation.
2. C-x C-e and C-j to evaluate sexps.
3. Simple expressions like (+ 2 2 )
4. The ' operator.
5. Assigning values to symbols using set and setq.
6. Executing simple functions like set-background-color.
7. Changing the value of variables like line-spacing.
8. Writing simple functions.
9. Using C-h f and C-h v to get documentation on functions and variables.

Further reading

• Steve Yegges Emergency Elisp is a quick primer for those who want to learn useful basics.
• Xah Lee’s Emacs lisp tutorial is another more detailed tutorial for the language.
• The official Gnu An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp is an elisp tutorial for non programmers.
• The official Emacs lisp reference is more thorough guide which is not very useful as a tutorial but handy to have around when you’re actually coding in elisp.