It looks great. I have not read it to completion just yet, but merely scrolling through the document leaves me with a feeling that the author got tired and decided "this is a good stopping point."

To be fair, writing a book about Emacs is a Sisyphean effort by definition - this sea is a bottomless abyss of hackery abundance, and any meaningful effort to explain it is worth a celebration.

• anthk

  last Thursday at 6:39 AM

  The Emacs' bundled documentation on Elisp (both the intro and the rest) are pretty much complete enough.

  On Elisp and multithreading/processing, well, just look at bordeaux-threads in Common Lisp where the support is not universal for Clisp. SBCL and ECL work, but...

• FergusArgyll

  last Wednesday at 11:34 PM

  I have a silly little vibe coded extension where I can star certain HN commenters so I know who to look for in which threads (just puts a small symbol next to the username)

  You are for emacs, happy to see you here... :)

  • aquariusDue

    today at 6:16 PM

    Reminds me of RES (Reddit Enhancement Suite) which I used to use a long time ago to do the same thing. One cool thing RES used to do was (if I remember right) when you clicked on the tag/note placed on the user it would take you to the comment when you first attributed that tag/note.

    On one hand I kinda miss doing stuff like that and would like a RES for Hacker News but on the other hand I feel like cyber stalking is out of fashion these days.

This is a bachelor's thesis from University of Uppsala submitted in March 2026.

I was having trouble accessing the Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet site (linked in headline) directly, so uploaded it here (link expires in 3 days):

https://temp.sh/CVzcQ/emacs-arch-thesis.pdf

• gwern

  last Wednesday at 11:28 PM

  https://gwern.net/doc/cs/lisp/emacs/2026-karlsson.pdf

• goodmythical

  last Wednesday at 8:12 PM

  Maximum download limit reached

  • LargoLasskhyfv

    last Wednesday at 11:06 PM

    Confirmed. Headline is working for me, though. (Meanwhile?)

Love to see that Emacs can still capture the atention of new CS students.

This is great! You should make a web version or add it to the wiki.

I started the Hacker's guide on the emacs wiki many years back. I think this doc was much needed.