This page contains snippets of code that demonstrate basic EmacsLisp programming operations in the spirit of the O’Reilly cookbook series of books. For every task addressed, a worked-out solution is presented as a short, focused, directly usable piece of code.

All this stuff can be found elsewhere, but it is scattered about in libraries, manuals, etc. It would be helpful to have here in one spot.

These recipes should be pastable into the scratch buffer so that users can hit ‘C-j’ and evaluate them step by step.

There’s going to be some overlap with CategoryCode, obviously. Just link to more elaborate pages when appropriate. Should this page grow too large, we’ll split it up later.