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Emacs Lisp
Dialect of Lisp in the Emacs text editor / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Emacs Lisp is a Lisp dialect made for Emacs. It is used for implementing most of the editing functionality built into Emacs, the remainder being written in C, as is the Lisp interpreter.
![]() Emacs logo | |
Paradigm | Functional, meta, reflective |
---|---|
Family | Lisp |
Designed by | Richard Stallman, Guy L. Steele, Jr. |
Developer | GNU Project |
First appeared | 1985; 39 years ago (1985) |
Stable release | 29.4
/ 22 June 2024; 39 days ago (2024-06-22) |
Typing discipline | Dynamic, strong |
Scope | Dynamic, optionally lexical |
Platform | Emacs |
OS | Cross-platform |
License | GPLv3 |
Filename extensions | .el, .elc, .eln |
Website | www |
Influenced by | |
Common Lisp, Maclisp |
Emacs Lisp code is used to modify, extend and customize Emacs. Those not wanting to write the code themselves the Customize function can be used. It provides a set of preferences pages allowing the user to set options and preview their effect in the running Emacs session. When the user saves their changes, Customize simply writes the necessary Emacs Lisp code to the user's config file, which can be set to a special file that only Customize uses, to avoid the possibility of altering the user's own file.
Besides being a programming language that can be compiled to bytecode[1] and transcompiled to native code,[2] Emacs Lisp can also function as an interpreted scripting language, much like the Unix Bourne shell or Perl, by calling Emacs in batch mode. In this way it may be called from the command line or via an executable file, and its editing functions, such as buffers and movement commands are available to the program just as in the normal mode. No user interface is presented when Emacs is started in batch mode; it simply executes the passed-in script and exits, displaying any output from the script.
Emacs Lisp is also termed Elisp, although there are also older, unrelated Lisp dialects with that name.[3][4]