Emacspeak discussion list

[Tim Cross <theophilusx AT gmail.com>]

The first thing to focus on is basic emacs competance. Emacs has some
powerful lisp editing facilities built in and it is best to start with
those. I would also highly recommend reading something like "Mastering
Emacs" (see https://www.masteringemacs.org/) as it will give you a good
grasp of the underlying philosophy of emacs' approach to editing as well
as basic usage and configuration. Emacspeak is built on top of this
functionality, so understanding it and being familiar with what it
offers is fundamental. You will also find focusing on using the built-in
help system and info pages extremely useful.

The built-in elisp mode provides some excellent functionality for
editing and navigating emacs lisp. Get to know this well
initially. Doing so will help get the basics under your belt and let you
get a feel for what is good, what is only just OK and what sucks. Once
you are across this, you will then be in a position to adequately
evalutate the many add-on packages which can further enhance the
experience. However, avoid installing additonal packages
initially. Often the functionality in these packages is already
available in core emacs, which is often better integrated into
emacspeak, but more importantly, some packages have conflicting
philosophies or aims and may actually complicate or degrade the
experience if not added judiciously. Also, many packages are designed
with a focus on visual interfaces and are not necessarily as useful to a
user with a vision impairment.

Get to know the info system, especially the Emacspeak info pages and the
Emacs info pages. I've lost count of the number of times I've wished for
some facility only to find it is already included and just needed to be
enabled or configured. Browsing the info nodes contains a wealth of
valuable information.

Additional resources which might be useful

Emacspeak User's Guide at
https://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/user-guide/index.html . It is a little
old, but still has some valuable information.

Emacspeak Tips & Tricks at https://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/tips.html

T.V. Raman's Emacspeak blog at https://emacspeak.blogspot.com

HTH

"Dhruv" (via emacspeak Mailing List) <emacspeak AT emacspeak.net> writes:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I'll be starting work on some slightly bigger elisp projects. I don't know 
> much about elisp editing with Emacs/Emacspeak,
> though. right now I've just been navigating my code the way I would 
> navigate other languages (linearly, top to bottom,
> keeping a track of parentheses in my head). But I think Emacs lets you 
> interact with Lisp much more in a tree-like way.
>
> For people who've substantially coded in lisp with Emacs: how do I get 
> started? can you give me general tips?
>
> Thanks!
>
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