Emacs Lisp

Emacs Lisp is a dialect of the Lisp programming language used by the GNU Emacs and XEmacs text editors (which this article will refer to collectively as "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 itself). Users of Emacs commonly write Emacs Lisp code to customize and extend Emacs.

Emacs Lisp can also function as a scripting language, much like the Unix Bourne shell, Perl, Python, scsh, or GNU Guile. Just as with those languages, it may be called from the command line or via an executable file. Its editing functions, such as buffers and movement commands, complement the features of Lisp and work in batch mode.

Some people refer to Emacs Lisp as Elisp, at the risk of confusion with an older unrelated Lisp dialect with the same name. In terms of features, it is closely related to the Maclisp dialect, with some later influence from Common Lisp. It supports imperative and functional programming methods. Richard Stallman chose Lisp as the extension language for his rewrite of Emacs (the original used TECO as its extension language) because of its powerful features, including the ability to treat functions as data. Unlike Common Lisp, Scheme existed at the time Stallman was rewriting Gosling Emacs into GNU Emacs, but he 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.

The Lisp dialect used in Emacs differs substantially from the more modern Common Lisp and Scheme dialects commonly used for applications programming. For example: Emacs Lisp uses dynamic rather than lexical scope by default. That is, local variables in a calling function can be referenced from a called function without passing pointers or references, regardless of whether the called function was defined within the caller.

Other methods exist for customizing GNU Emacs apart from writing Emacs Lisp. Since version 20, GNU Emacs has included a "Customize" facility which allows users to set common customization variables through a graphical interface. "Customize" works by writing Emacs Lisp code for the user, and is limited to relatively simple customizations. Not every user needs the full degree of extensibility offered by Emacs; those who do can write their own Emacs Lisp code.