Welcome to Awesome Elisp, a list of resources linked to Emacs Lisp (Elisp) development.
Its aim is to not be a simple index but a compendium: resources are not only listed but also commented.
It tries to be as exhaustive as possible.
For a more general index related to all-things Emacs, use Awesome Emacs.
Elisp is short for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of Lisp specific to Emacs.
If you’re a fresh Emacs user, you’ve certainly practiced it a bit by editing your init.el (i.e. configuration).
You may also have spotted that most packages (i.e. plugins) available to Emacs are written in pure Elisp.
In fact, Elisp is not limited to extending Emacs functionalities: a good chunk (and admittedly not enough) of Emacs is written in it.
This means that any user can browse, extend or even override core Emacs functionalities at runtime.
As such, in essence, Emacs is not an editor but more a platform allowing users to write text-based apps.
Being an editor is not its intrinsic nature but merely a feature.
Learning Elisp will up your Emacs game tremendously, unlocking its full potential by writing functionalities either for your personal needs or to share with the world.
As an added bonus, it’s great fun.
An Introduction to Programming in Emacs LispAlso comes bundled with Emacs. Just C-h i (or M-x info) and open Emacs Lisp Intro.
A bit scholarly. Not the easiest read.
Emacs In A Box - Elisp ProgrammingVery complete and gentle introduction.
Written by Caio Rordrigues (@caiorss).
(Almost) All You Need to Know About VariablesA must read!
Focused on introducing general concepts and terminology.
Focused around data structures. More like a cheat sheet.
xahlee.info - Practical Emacs Lispread online, accompagnying youtube live streams
One of the first resources on the web introducing Elisp in a concise and comprehensible way.
The website used to be called ergoemacs.
Still updated regularly.
Please note that a few more complex examples follow an older coding style: big monolithic functions instead of multiple small functional ones.
Focused around data structures.
Author’s Common Lisp background can be felt.
Emacs Lisp Reference ManualAlso comes bundled with Emacs. Just C-h i (or M-x info) and open Elisp.
Comprehensive guide of core Elisp APIs.
Generally well written but needs you to understand its logic and be familiar with Emacs terminology.
The Emacs Lisp Style GuideProvides solid guidelines on the dos and don’ts for quality Elisp code.
The Emacs Package Developer’s Handbook@alphapapa’s organized notes about Elisp development.
List bunch of tools and libraries for helping package developers.
Also provides various snippets and best practices.
Lots of good insights.
Chris Wellons (@skeeto)’s blog, especially the posts tagged #elisp.
A few highlights:
Pretty old but has very good insights, guidelines and real-world examples.
Byte compiler section is outdated but general coding style recommendations and sections about macros and profiling are still relevant to this day.
Very good and beginner-friendly.
Almost complete list of single-liner examples of standard function. Also packs examples for dash and s.
Really nice selection of snippets with real-world use-cases.
Community-driven snippets, beginner-friendly.
@alphapapa’s unpackaged.elReal-world selection of snippets, not beginner-friendly.
The Emacs Lisp Style Guide applies all the more in this context.
Article: Take Your Emacs to the Next Level by Writing Custom PackagesReal world experience of a user writing and submitting his first package.
There’s a high chance that you’ll be uploading your package on MELPA.
They have clear recommandations.
Don’t worry, for your first submissions, they will be very comprehensive and will help you fixing what’s wrong.
The CONTRIBUTE file is the official document describing the process. Additional development tips and coding conventions can be found in the Elisp Manual.
M-x view-emacs-todo shows a lists of TODO items you might want to work on. You can also browse the bug archive using M-x debbugs-gnu using the debbugs package.
Contributing to Emacs gives some helpful background information and overview about the contribution workflow for newcomers.
By default, Emacs is already pretty well set up for Elisp development.
But some features can be hard to learn and some stuff can be improved with additinal packages.
See also those talks John Wiegley gave about his setup for Elisp development:
Emacs is built with interactive development in mind.
You could spend days developing Elisp code without ever having to restart Emacs.
Standard commands used are:
eval-last-sexp (C-x C-e)eval-defun (C-M-x)eval-buffereval-regionThe *scratch* buffer also provides a temporary zone to try and test ideas. In it can be used eval-print-last-sexp (C-j) which acts like eval-last-sexp but also prints the result after the s-exp in the buffer.
eval-expression (M-:) allows quickly evaluating a s-exp from anywhere by entering it in the minibuffer.
For logging, function (message "<text>") allows printing into the *Messages* buffer.
For debugging, the most basic command is toggle-debug-on-error to get a stacktrace.
See also:
Stands for Inferior Emacs Lisp Mode.
Provides a REPL for evaluating Elisp code.
edebug is the interactive Elisp debugger.
The documentation is a bit rough to get started. I recommend reading this series of posts:
You can also read the dedicated chapter in book An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp.
Provides a simple facility to output a trace of function calls into a buffer (*trace-buffer*).
Please note that this trace is very basic and has no performance data. For more advanced tracing see Profiling.
Tracing is switched on / off with commands trace-function, untrace-function and untrace-all.
Interactive macro expander.
Expand nested macros one by one.
Way better than using default macroexpand.
Provides eval-expr, an enhanced eval-expression command.
Some highlights:
pp)Visual improvment.
Flashes the sexps during the evaluation.
Show evaluation results inline.
Documentation & IntrospectionTo get the documentation of a symbol, you could use one of the built-in:
describe-symbol: get documentation of symboldescribe-function: get documentation of functiondescribe-variable: get documentation of variabledescribe-key: get documentation of command associated with keybindingThese would spawn a *Help* buffer. Hence documentation in Emacs is often referred to as the help. For searching through symbols Emacs also comes with various apropos-* commands which populate a buffer with your search results.
Some packages improve on these.
Provides more contextual information.
helpful command default command commenthelpful-at-point describe-symbol helpful-callable no equivalent like helpful-function but also works on macros and special forms helpful-function describe-function helpful-macro no equivalent helpful-variable describe-variable helpful-key describe-key
Provides usage examples in the *Help* buffer.
which-key is like an always-on describe-key.
It displays automatically all the possible keybindings following a key prefix.
Discover elisp functions by specifying input and the desired output.
To jump to the definition of a symbol Emacs provides xref-find-definitions. In practice it works with nicely with functions but is kind of hit-or-miss with variables.
In addition, the following more specialised functions exist:
find-function: go to the definition of functionfind-variable: go to the definition of variablefind-library: go to the definition of feature (i.e. module, package)Better options exists so that you don’t have to remember all of these.
Honorable mention: elisp-slime-nav, that can be seen as an ancestor to elisp-def. If you want to jump to symbols in files which aren’t loaded in your Emacs you can fallback to the more general dumb-jump package.
Provides elisp-def that allows jumping to the definition of function / variable / feature.
Like a better xref-find-definitions.
Is able to distinguish between functions / variables / features depending on the context.
Also handles macros, functions defined through macros and let-bound variables.
In Emacs regular expressions can make use of syntax information provided by the major-mode. This means that to some extend semantic searches are possible with isearch and occur. To search and jump to toplevel definitions of a buffer you can use the built-in imenu. The imenu-anywhere package allows to extend the scope to buffers of the same project or mode.
Semantic code search for Elisp which parses the code instead of doing dump text searches.
Lets you execute search and replace operations on symbolic expressions. For example you can search for things like defvars which don’t specify an init value using the pattern `(defvar ,_)`.
Honorable mentions:
speed-of-thought-lisp, it is less context-aware and requires a specific key combination to trigger. It offers other features, though, and can be used complementarily.Allows writting Elisp blazingly fast with the use of context-aware abbreviations triggered after <SPACE> keypress.
Enriched syntax highlighting for docstring contents. Together with string-edit you can edit docstrings in a temporary buffer and get automated special character escaping.
Elisp is a Lisp and Lisps are written using a structure of nested lists called S-expressions.
Mastering how to navigate and manipulate this structure with ease is essential.
By default Emacs doesn’t offer much apart from forward-list / backward-list and forward-sexp / backward-sexp.
Luckily, powerful minor-modes are available to give you the power you deserve.
source & doc, cheat sheet, video demos
Easiest to learn yet most powerful solution in that list.
Like paxedit, commands are context-aware.
The killing feature is that shortcuts are single characters and not key combinations.
The trick is that commands get triggered only when the point is at a delimiter (e.g. a parenthesis) or the region is active.
Provides a powerful command combination system and refactoring commands.
Builds on paredit, lispy and evil-cleverparens to provide a consistent vim-style modal way of editing trees.
Offers a hydra interface to aid learning, and an evil state (also works in vanilla emacs).
Heavily inspired by paredit.
The major difference with the latter is that commands are context-aware, they behave differently depending on what the cursor is hovering on.
The direct consequence is that fewer commands / shortcuts needs to be learned to perform the same amount of things.
The first powerful S-exp editing mode for Emacs.
Learning curve is a bit steep.
Still actively maintained and very popular.
Aids the refactoring process by presenting a graphical visualization of project dependencies.
Contains various refactoring commands for Elisp.
Auto-indents code as you type.
Focuses on placement of lists and tries to break lines at fill-column
For simulating interactive user input, consider using libraries such as with-simulated-input (launch commands) and dokey (simulated keyboard shortcut presses). To test behavior and interactive usage in a clean and temporary environment emacs-sandbox.sh is useful.
doc, blog post on nullprogram.com
Stands for “Emacs Lisp Regression Testing”.
Featureful and easy to use.
Suitable for unit tests with mocking.
Behavior-Driven Emacs Lisp Testing
Especially suitable for integration tests.
Allows defining test suites (i.e. goups of related tests) with a shared context (through set-up and tear-down phases).
Also provides mocking capabilities.
For a complete example of integration w/ undercover and coverage:
Program sequence of user interactions. Useful for end-to-end testing.
Inspired by Selenium Webdriver.
Track test coverage and integrate w/ coverage reporting solutions.
For in-Emacs reporting, use the coverage package.
Emacs provides 2 Elips profilers:
profiler.el: profile a whole call stack, easier to useelp.el: profile only selected functionsBoth are briefly mentioned in the profiling section of the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual.
Either one is of a great help to debug slow Elisp code, most noticeable during user interactions (Emacs seems to freeze).
profiler.el is easily toggled using profiler-start, profiler-stop. To obtain a result report call profiler-report.
elp.el can target individual functions with elp-instrument-function or a whole package with elp-instrument-package.
To profile individual forms Emacs also comes with the benchmark library. The Emacs Package Developer’s Handbook has a whole section dedicated to this with thorough examples and helper macros.
Wrapper around elp.el outputting a report in the Chromium Catapult Trace Event Format.
This allows opening them in external applications to explore them as flame graphs.
Emacs provides various functions to validate an Elisp file / project:
byte-compile-file: validate the file compiles cleanlycheckdoc: validate the documentationcheck-declare-file / check-declare-directory: validate the declaration of symbolspackage-lint-current-buffer: validate format for submitting as a packageIt’s tedious to run manually each and every of those commands. Thankfully projects aim at making this process easier.
For maximum efficiency, they can be integrated into a CI chain (GitHub actions or Travis).
In addition to standard validation, it adds a license checker and some additional checks.
Created by MELPA member @riscy to validate submissions.
Does not run tests.
Provides recipes for integration with GitHub actions or Travis.
Very straightforward way to validate an Emacs package folder / repository.
Provides a makefile with different targets to run.
Implemented in bash with a makefile wrapper.
Performs linting (make lint), tests (make test) or everything (make all).
In addition to standard checks, also validates indentation and optionally elsa checks.
Supports both ERT and buttercup tests.
One drawback is that this makem.sh sources have to be dropped in each of your package source repository.
Provides recipes for integration with GitHub actions.
Provides a makefile with different targets to run.
Implemented completely as a makefile.
Requires a bit of configuration for each package.
One drawback is that this makel sources have to be dropped in each of your package source repository.
No CI integration recipes.
A zero config github action to validate packages.
Compiles current file on save and display compile errors/warnings in the mode-line.
Performs standard validation of specified file. Also checks for indentation.
No CI integration recipes.
Static Elisp code analyzer providing helpful hints.
Can be launched directly from makem.sh.
Lints Elisp files for requirements of packages. Can be integrated with flycheck (a general linter framework) by installing flyspell-package.
Those tools, in addition to what those in the Validation section provide, are full-fledged build-definition tools, allowing to make complex CI/CD chains.
They require a fair amount of configuration and are not for the faint of heart.
They only seem necessary when building larger packages with exotic dependencies.
Stands for “Elisp Development Tool”.
Certainly the most modern of the lot.
100% written in Elisp.
One small drawback is that it does not run in a dedicated isolated Emacs process.
Pretty advanced and hard to get into.
Implemented in python.
Runs in a dedicated isolated Emacs process
Successor to cask.
Implemented in JavaScript (Node.js).
Take a look at the comparison to see how eask differs from other tools
The most simple to use from this list.
Implemented in Elisp with a makefile wrapper.
Easier to integrate with CI tools such as Travis.
Create new fully-featured Github repositories with minimal effort, including doc generation and CI.
Integrates common development & distribution workflows such as testing & package reloading.
Designed to work out of the box but also appropriate for complex 3rd party and non-Elisp module integrations.
Syntax Highlighting & Visual EnhancementsSeveral packages provide visual improvements and extend default syntax highlighting (font locking in Emacs lingo).
All those listed bellow are complementary.
Honorable mentions:
lisp-extra-font-lock functionalitiesNot Elisp-specific but commonly used in the context of Elisp development:
^L) are used in Elisp source as a section delimiters. Either page-break-lines or form-feed can be used to display them as intended.Various additional syntax highlightings.
Killer feature is having different faces for special vars (global) VS normal ones (local).
Make functions calls stand out with a specific face.
Provides additional / alternative font-locking for cl-lib symbols, to make them stand out in your code.
Also highlights deprecated cl symbols with a different face. Useful when reading legacy code.
Make regular expression strings more readable.
Hide prefix in symbols of a package.
Standard Emacs pretty-printing util.
Advanced pretty-printing utils.
Traditionally, it was recommended to not use external libs/dependencies and prefer using standard APIs bundled with Emacs.
These recommendation are still mostly valid but predated the advent of package.el.
Some external libs are now considered “standard”, as lots of popular packages use them and they can outperform standard implementations while still being simpler to use (e.g. dash).
Some libraries might be listed several times, as they fit in several categories (e.g. subr-x, dash).
Lib extending Elisp with functionalities inherited from Common Lisp. Replaces the deprecated cl package which did not use name prefixes. To help with updating the code from cl to cl-lib there is cl-libify.
Just do a (require 'cl-lib) to use it.
Intended as an extension to subr.el, the core library of basic functions written in Elisp.
Provides:
thread-first and thread-last)if-let, if-let*, when-let, when-let* and and-let*) - hash-table manipulation helper (hash-table-empty-p, hash-table-keys and hash-table-values)string-empty-p, string-blank-p, string-join, string-trim, string-trim-left, string-trim-right, string-remove-prefix and string-remove-suffix)replace-region-contents)Even though this lib revolves primarily around list manipulation, it also offers for general purpose utils.
Those are:
They all seem to be heavily inspired by Clojure.
More perene advices, get notified when they break.
Allows the definition of anaphoric functions (as can be found in Common Lisp, Clojure…).
Simulate user interactions (i.e. launch commands).
Mostly usefull for writing tests.
Trigger keyboard events.
Provides data structure defintions as contracts (essentially interface description).
Port of Racket’s contract to Elisp.
Akin to Clojure’s spec.
Reimplementation of hooks, with more advanced features.
Allows creating weak reference to vars. Weak reference offer better performance but can be garbage collected.
Provides Clojure-style multimethods (multiple dispatch over an ad hoc type hierarchy).
Provices Haskell-inspired Category Theory abstractions.
Provides macros for a more concise lambda syntax, a la Clojure.
Provide the following helpers: string-empty-p, string-blank-p, string-join, string-trim, string-trim-left, string-trim-right, string-remove-prefix and string-remove-suffix.
Advanced yet easy to use string manipulation helpers.
Macro for helping writing Elisp regexp.
Convert regexp to their more human-readable rx macro form.
Also provides regexp linting, detecting mistakes and bad practices.
Relies on its own internal parser.
Advanced yet easy to use list manipulation helpers. Lots of them also have alternative anaphoric forms.
Allows defining streams of data as data sequences. Compatible w/ seq.el.
Provides APIs for building and manipulating tries, sequence-like data structures where both storage and retrieval are space- and time-efficient.
Stored elements must be ordered sequences, i.e. strings (most common use-case), lists or vectors.
Provides lister-mode, major mode for building and manipulating list-based user-interfaces.
Inspired by tablist (for tables) and hierarchy (for trees).
(Hash)maps are a special type of sequences that allow representing a list of key / value pairs. In other languages they can also be called associative arrays or dictionaries.
In Elisp, a map can be represented as:
The official doc also has a nice section comparing plists and alists.
tl;dr:
Older Emacs packages tend to rely mostly on alists, sometimes for no good reason.
Each data structure has its own APIs to get/insert/update.
Thankfully, some libraries provide an abstraction layer that allows having a single API for multiple data structures.
I would recommend sticking with the default map.el library, unless you really enjoy the Clojure syntax in which case a.el is also a nice choice. If you know for sure that you want to stick with an alist or a hash-table, asoc.el and ht are high quality choices.
supports: alists, plists and hash-tables.
Shared API for all 3 Elisp map objects (+ arrays).
No documentation other than what is inlined in source.
supports: only alists.
Nice set of additional APIs for alists.
supports: only hash-tables, but allow converting from/to alists and plists.
Nice set of additional APIs for hash-tables.
supports: alists and hash-tables.
Shared API for alists and hash-tables. Like map.el, but in a more “Clojurey” syntax.
support: mostly alists, but allow converting from/to alists and plists.
Provides APIs for building and manipulating Dictionary trees, hybrid between tries and hash tables.
Think about it as a more storage-efficient hash tables.
Can be done natively using records, additional custom user-defined types.
One part of cl-lib is APIs to define and manipulate C-like data structures, strongly typed.
Provides the cl-defstruct macro.
Built on top of the native records system.
See also this blog post from @skeeto: Options for Structured Data in Emacs Lisp
Stands for Enhanced Implementation of Emacs Interpreted Objects.
Brings an OOP layer to Elisp, based upon the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS).
Provides the defclass macro.
Built on top of the native records system.
Advanced yet easy to use datetime / timestamp library.
Library for parsing, formatting, matching and recoding timestamps and date-time format strings.
Provides datetime-format, inspired by PHP’s Datetime::format method.
Library for defining, manipulating and displaying tables.
Extension to tabulated-list, adding possibility to mark and filter items.
Facilitate the creation of tabulated-list-based UIs.
Also relies on tablist.
Provides gridlock-mode, major mode for building and manipulating spreadsheet-based user-interfaces
Also provides gridlock-csv-mode and gridlock-fix-mode minor modes, backporting the API to CSV and FIX files.
Provides cell-mode, major mode for building and manipulating spreadsheet-based user-interfaces.
Library for defining, manipulating and displaying tables.
Provides FIFO / FILO queue APIs.
An EIEIO abstract class class to provide FIFO methods to slots.
Even though ring is the standard implementation, some core libs use their own internal implementation (e.g. the kill-ring).
Provides APIs to create and manipulate a ring data structure.
Used by: ERC
Similar to ring, but w/ a dynamic size.
Escaped and nested S-exps is the most straightforward way to encode a tree in (E)lisp.
Some libraries deliver higherèlevel data structure with manipulation functions for improved performance and convenience.
Provides APIs to build and manipulate a ternary (at most 3 children per node) heap (self-sorting tree).
Provides APIs to build and manipulate a self-balancing binary tree.
Allows defining trees as well as building user interfaces displaying them.
Allows defining and traversing trees.
Allows defining hierarchical taxonomies, i.e. trees w/ automatic classification based on (nested) rules.
Self-balancing interval trees.
Implementation of Chris Okasaki’s algorithm from “Red-black trees in a functional setting”, JFP’99.
Visualize and explore nested S-exps as a tree.
Those libraries allow parsing a document in a format / language and converting it to an tree, called an an AST.
Regexp-based parser, supporting a bunch of languages.
doc, source, reddit post, example usage article
Implemented as a module, binding with the tree-sitter parser (written in Rust).
For a concrete use-case, have a look at tree-edit.
For a better sitter grammar for elisp (distinguishing between var, functions and macros), use tree-sitter-elisp.
source & doc, presentation @ EmacsConf21
Powerful parser and transformer library, relying on the concept of composable functional molds.
Also support asynchronous processing (relying on async).
Provides APIs to build and manipulate NFA (Nondeterministic Finite Automaton), i.e. a state machine / decision tree.
It was built manily with regexp parsing in mind.
Parsing library in the spirit of Haskell’s parsec.
Parsing library in the spirit of Haskell’s parsec. Somewhat limited.
DOM manipulation and searching functions.
List-based XML selectors. Part of the elfeed package.
org-mode outlines (spec) can be considered both a file format and a tree format.
source, doc, tutorial on ergoemacs
org-mode’s internal parser, used to convert a text buffer into a tree structure (parse-tree).
Functional manipulation of an org parse-tree.
Query language (DSL) for parsing, searching and filtering an org outline.
More user-friendly APIs for writting code for interacting with org documents.
Faces are a group of attributes controlling the formatting of text in Emacs.
It’s akin to CSS for HTML or styling ANSI escape sequences for terminal text.
You can read more about faces in the Emacs manual or the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual.
Convert faces to other formats.
Currently, only LaTeX is supported.
Color codes manipulation, with support for various color spaces.
Color codes manipulation.
Concurrency / AsynchronicityConcurrency in Elisp / Emacs is a hot topic.
Due to its single-threaded nature, we can’t do parallel processing unless using some dirty tricks (see async).
But that doesn’t prevent us from doing concurrent processing, with say timers.
Fairly recently, Emacs extended this support with generators (since 25.1) and native threads (not what you might be thinking of, since 26.1).
For more info on those subject, read:
Default timer lib.
Easier to use timer lib.
Provides an API for creating and dereferencing / evaluating delays.
Reimplementation of the Promises/A+ open standard (originally targeting Javascript).
Mostly an async/await lib but implements its own promise system internally.
Async Elisp function callsNot super-actively maintained, but quite stable and featureful.
Achieves concurrency through the use of timers.
Also allows handling async (sub-)processes and HTTP calls with request.el bindings.
Higher-level wrapper around deferred.
Provides various syntaxes inspired by those of other programming languages, such as:
threads)generators)signals / channels).Achieves true parallel processing by spawning a child Emacs sub-process. As such, necessary context needs to be passed w/ async-inject-variables.
Supports defining callbacks.
Offers bindings w/ dired, bytecomp and smtp-mail.
Multithreading through sub-processes with over-the-wire payload capabilities.
Achieves true parallel processing by spawning a child Emacs sub-process for each thread.
Short for async-io.
Allows writing coroutines with the async/await syntax found in Python’s asyncio.
Internal representation relies on its own promise implementation and generators.
Simple implementation of Async/Await, based on the TypeScript syntax.
Relies on promise.el and generators.
lcr stands for Lightweight CoRoutines.
Seems to rely on timers.
These libs only allow to run asynchronously command processes (as opposed to Elisp function calls).
It can be done in standard with low-level function make-process or derivatives start-process, make-pipe-process and start-process-shell-command.
Some advanced behaviours are hard to program, that’s why wrapper libraries can help you.
Notably:
Not super-actively maintained, but featureful.
Also allows handling async Elisp function calls and HTTP calls with request.el bindings.
Stands for Background Process Runner. Allows running a command process in the background.
Allows advanced callback behaviours.
It relies on start-process-shell-command.
Allows running a command process in the background.
Result can be handled either with a future (pfuture-new, pfuture-result) or a callback (pfuture-callback).
It relies on make-pipe-process for the future-based implementation and make-process for the callback one.
Emacs provides a layer on top of make-process for spawning commands from a shell interpreter (i.e. bash or zsh).
These are provided by simple.el (source).
The async version of these command is async-shell-command.
Some advanced behaviours are hard to program, that’s why wrapper libraries can help you.
Provides dtache-shell-command, a drop-in replacement for async-shell-command that allows command execution to persist even after the Emacs process exits.
Also works on remote hosts.
Relies on dtach to create a persistent session.
friendly-shell-command provides friendly-shell-command-async, a wrapper around async-shell-command with easier access to advanced behaviours thanks to optional keyword arguments.
It notably eases associating a callback to the end of the execution, running on remote hosts and launching with alternative interpreters.
Utility functions for buffer manipulation.
Utilities for helping with manipulating a buffer’s text properties.
List-oriented functions for accessing and manipulating the contents of Emacs buffers.
Modern API for working with files and directories.
Emacs comes already with an HTTP client, url.el, written in pure Elisp (source), which has a few limitations. It exposes functions url-retrieve-synchronously and url-retrieve (async).
If found on the system, uses the cURL binary instead of url.el. Can be customized with request-backend.
Supports a bunch of options exposed clearly with keyword arguments.
Advanced asynchronicity via bindings with deferred.
Uses the cURL binary (curl) instead of url.el.
Supports a bunch of options exposed clearly with keyword arguments.
Supports both synchronous & asynchronous calls, as well as queuing.
When doing async request, the returned handler is a curl process object.
Strong contender for a lightweight alternative to request.
Stands for “Multiple Backends for URL package”.
Provides API-compatible replacements to url-retrieve and url-retrieve-synchronously using cURL and HTTPie.
Websocket (peristent HTTP connection) client for Emacs.
Macros to ease the definition of binding functions to HTTP APIs.
Wrapper for let-binding HTTP proxies.
A web server written in pure Elisp, serving HTTP.
A web server written in pure Elisp, serving HTTP APIs bound to Elisp functions (handlers).
A Remote Procedure Call server allows Emacs to receive commands from a remote process through a messaging system.
It’s a common strategy of inter-process communication (IPC).
Start a HTTP-based RPC server under Emacs.
Commands are direct Elisp code to be executed. They can (by default) only be called synchronously.
Messages are encoded in JSON (following the JSON-RPC 2.0 Specification) which makes it support client libraries of almost any language.
Relies on web-server.
Start a RPC client & server under Emacs.
It implements its own protocol (over TCP) and support both synchronous & asynchronous execution (via bindings with deferred).
Commands are explicitly defined (akin to handlers bound to routes in an HTTP API).
Messages are encoded as Lisp / S-exprs, which makes it more challenging to implement client libraries in non-Lisp languages.
D-Bus is the most popular inter-process communication (IPC) protocol under Linux.
Emacs supports it by default.
Very boilerplate-y to use.
EIEIO abstractions over dbus for writting easier interaction code.
Not a client per se.
Provides sql-mode, a comint-based REPL wrapper supporting various CLI client interpreters.
Recent Emacs now embbeds a native SQLite3 database & the accompagnying client.
High-level client to SQLite, PostgreSQL & MySQL.
Queries and schema definitions are written in specific tree-based DSLs, allowing easy programmatic manipulation.
ORM providing mapping between EIEIO and SQLite tables.
Relies on emacsql.
Client to SQL dialects, using Perl’s Database Interface (DBI) as a connection interface.
In addition to programmatic querying capabilities, provides several major modes for user interactions with database instances.
Abstraction on top of SQL clients (either emacsql or sqlite) to represent & store a graph database.
Honorable mention: magic-buffer, an executable cookbook on how to use & abuse Emacs’ buffer display engine.
User selection menu in the form of a popup.
Helpers to manipulate overlays. Originally authored by @ShingoFukuyama. Unmaintained.
Emacs has too many heroes to really list.
In this section, we list some users who have significantly contributed with libraries and resources that improve the Emacs development experience.
They are listed in alphabetical order.
Another complementary list is elisp-maintainers.
Contributed to Elisp development with:
makem.shtsplzorg-qlgithub, Emacs-related blog, open to sponsoring
Known for:
Contributed to Elisp development with:
Caio Rordrigues (@caiorss)Contributed to Elisp development with:
Known for:
Contributed to Elisp development with:
aioemacsqlsimple-httpdweek-refKnown for:
use-packageContributed to Elisp development with:
async.elblog, github, open to sponsoring
Known for:
Contributed to Elisp development with:
closqlContributed to Elisp development with:
Known for:
Contributed to Elisp development with:
seq.el and map.elstream.elblog, github, open to sponsoring
Author of many high-quality packages such as ivy, hydra, lispy…
Known for:
Contributed to Elisp development with his implementation of basic and more complex data structures: queue, heap, avl-tree, trie, dict-tree, tNFA.
website, youtube live streams, open to sponsoring
Known for:
Prolific and dedicated contributor to the Emacs and Emacs Lisp community, through his website, live streams and numerous Emacs packages.
His resources cover and connect a broad spectrum of topics, from text editing and their ergonomics to programming languages and mathematics.
He his known for being able to convey advanced concepts in an accessible way, regularly encouraging both newcomers and seasoned users to explore Emacs’ full potential.
Contributions and suggestions are always welcome!
The original author made this document available as he felt something like it was missing.
The idea is to have this evolve into a community effort, the initial version being only a baseline.
Open one issue or PR / subject matter.
Don’t go submit a gazillion unrelated changes that would conflict with other’s submitted PRs.
Try to not be too opinionated.
Some solutions are objectively better in some regards than others and that can be stated but don’t go launch a flame war.
Descriptions of libraries and tools expressed in this document are always subject to change. If a description feels too negative, don’t hesitate to open an issue to discuss it.
The aim of this document is to (loosely) follow the style of other awesome lists.
Content should be concise and always follow the same format.
In this spirit, no block quotes, no code snippets and no in-depth explanation of concepts should appear here.
This is no cookbook, no manual, no article.
Section can have small introduction to contextualize things (e.g. built-in libs) but should remain succinct, instead favoring links to external articles.
The introduction of the Concurrency / Asynchronicity is a good example of concisely presenting the necessary information and linking to external resources.
On the contrary, the Maps section goes into too much details and should instead link to an article.
Relevant Content: Development ToolsIn Development Tools, only list tools and package that are specific to Elisp development.
It’s very tempting to list stuff such as projectile or treemacs but those packages apply not only to Elisp development and should not be listed.
Don’t create a sub-section for tools that have modern counterpart and are deprecated / no more maintained. You could eventually mention them like it’s done for highlight-defined in Syntax Highlighting & Visual Enhancements.
In Libraries, only list packages that were created to be used as libraries and generic enough to target a broad range of applications.
E.g. HTTP client libs such as request have their place, wrappers targeting a specific API (such as ghub or pocket-lib) don’t.
Each linked resource / tool / library should be commented.
This comment is a short intro and analysis and must not be copy-pasted directly from the linked resource page.
Instead it should provide insights as to how it compares to other links in a similar category: what are the differences, advantages, drawbacks.
This description should be short and ideally not exceed a few lines.
Order of Tools & LibrariesTry to put the most “standard” entries first.
By standard we mean, in order: embedded in Emacs, most sane or used by the most people / projects.
Don’t submit a PR single-handedly deciding to reorganize the whole document structure.
Open an issue and provoke conversation.
What can feel natural to you can be counter-intuitive to others.
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