

Xah's Emacs Lisp Tutorial - jackhammer2022
http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/elisp.html

======
jrockway
If you write Lisp like Xah suggests, people will laugh at you. Just read the
Emacs Lisp Introduction that ships with Emacs, that actually teaches idiomatic
Emacs Lisp.

------
superxor
I've been a fairly recent Emacs user, a year and half I suppose. I've found
Xah really helpful in some cases when I was starting with Emacs. He tries to
start online discussions, writes some tutorials in his blog, even starts G+
hangouts where he helps random people, and all this voluntarily.

I have no idea what discussions he has trolled or what controversies he was
involved in. But there is a humble volunteer part of him I appreciate (like
this HN item), and I believe in this way he adds some real value to the
community.

------
winestock
Xah Lee's ErgoEmacs fork of GNU Emacs is a memory hog. On my machine, the
EmacsW32 program uses 23,032 K of working set with three text buffers open.
With the same buffers open, ErgoEmacs uses more than 103,000 K. The most
significant differences between ErgoEmacs and other Emacsen (actually, the
whole point to ErgoEmacs) are user-interface issues. ErgoEmacs uses
keybindings that match Windows conventions. I wish that I were as prolific as
him, but he should include some tips on memory usage in his tutorials.

~~~
agumonkey
Is it a fork ? I thought it was a distribution. I never read that they changed
emacs core, so I thought it was just a vanilla build with
prepackaged/preconfigured bits to reflect their principles.

------
kindahero
Alex wrote this[1] on emacswiki page, and I totally agree with him.

    
    
          Xah has also been a well known troll on various comp.lang.* newsgroups and played in the same league as ErikNaggum. Just browse some older stuff in the Usenet archives. – AlexSchroeder
    

[1] <http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Xah_Lee>

~~~
jrockway
I kind of doubt Xah is actually trolling; he's just a strange person with
strange ideas. How many people blog about their first experience with a
prostitute under their real name?

------
ghosTM55
Xah is one of my best friends, he's a nice guy :)

------
probably
He's been a controversial figure in many forums but his emacs lisp tutorial is
the best out there. I gave him a donation through Paypal (for approximately
the price of an O'Reilly book) and he personally sent me an email thanking me.

~~~
probably
Well, looks like he's got ads on his site now which I suppose takes place of
the donation button.

~~~
agumonkey
Not sure but I think it's an emergency measure to sustain income.

------
markwong
I'm reading your tutorial. very helpful and informative!

