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  • cenazoic · 7 days ago

    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

  • iLemming · 7 days ago

    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.

    • FergusArgyll · 7 days ago

      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 · 3 days ago

        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.

      • anthk · 7 days ago

        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...

        • shawn_w · 3 days ago

          Lots of things don't work with clisp.

        • shakow · 3 days ago

          > the author got tired and decided "this is a good stopping point."

          Or the deadline was closing in, as this is a university thesis ;)

          • bjourne · 3 days ago

            Correct. The thesis is worth 10 weeks of full-time work by someone on their third study year.

        • hgp22 · 6 days ago

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

          • anthk · 3 days ago

            Emacs is like a hackers' playground. It's an editor, it has a Lisp, networking support, tools, IRC, Email, Usenet and more by default, a PDF reader, a calculator (with gnuplot support it has graphs), a doc generating platform, an agenda, a silly chatbot...

            • tra3 · 3 days ago

              One of the oldest open source projects in the existence?

              It makes building custom UI workflows so easy, I think it’s both obvious and flies under the radar.

              • anthk · 3 days ago

                With Emacs widgets and some settings at init.el (for speed) you can almost create a grude GUI for something with all the power of Elisp (and disabling nearly all keybdings OFC).

          • aaptel · 3 days ago

            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.