speed-of-thought-lisp VS helpful

Try speed of thought lisp and see if you like it, or yasnippet. I think it is great, I can just type acronym (actually could be any abbrev) and space and it completes, however I dislike the fact that it requires me to remember acronyms. But I do use it for some of the more usual stuff like with-current-buffer is wcb, require is r and so on.

Paredit, Speed-of-thought lisp, Helm, perhaps Lispy but I am not using it myself. I found expand-region to work really well when writing and modifying elisp. lisp-extra-font-lock if you want some more blink (and font-lock-studio). Helpful is very good to have instead of built-in help, it displays the source code by default as well as symbol properties. It is a very informative learning experience to see how built-in stuff is implemented. I am quite lazy to press extra in built-in help to see the source code, but with Helpful, you get it auto in the same window, whicih is great for learning. Seeing symbol properties is sometimes a time saver so you don't have to M-: and type an Elisp function to see the symbol properties when debugging. Learn Edebug, it is very useful built-in application for Emacs Lisp development.

If you want to programmatically create files, write to them, etc, then read the fine manual, it comes with your Emacs, has index, search and web-like navigation. It is well worth your time investing in looking up the manual, both for Emacs and for Elisp. You access the manual via C-h i. Another good thing to learn how to use is Emacs built-in help. As a minimal basic, C-h f will display information about functions, and C-h v will display the documentation for variables. You can also see where things are declared, open the source code, etc. A good alternative to built-in help is Helpful, which I suggest installing and start using too.

It tweaks Emacs GC. You can run M-x describe-variable while your cursor is at gc-cons-threshold to learn about it. If you opted-in for using "Vim bindings" (Evil mode), you can press K while in normal mode. Note that K doesn't run the describe- command in Doom, but it runs helpful-command from (https://github.com/Wilfred/helpful), which provides more context that describe- commands usually do.

The packages helpful and elisp-demos are super useful because they enhance Emacs' built-in documentation.

You can try to actually use helpful for a while. There was also a package with examples, I don't remember the name, perhaps someone else knows which I mean, that shows usage of a function where available. I remember using it and found it very useful for a while when I was learning elisp more actively. I still use helpful sometimes.

Once you got the hang of keybindings, which-key is a helpful extension (aka package) to Emacs. At this stage, there are other helpful packages and keybindings.

helpful for better help buffers

Since you seem interested, have a look at elisp-demos , too. It works in tandem with helpful.

Elisp Docs are fantastic they have documented everything while with CL most documentation is missing or only on the Web. With Emacs, one need to learn about C-h f (describe-function), C-h k (describe-key), helpful.el and elisp-demos and a new world opens. Terminology is always different, simple example: Microsoft terminology sounds like bullshit, to a Unix person.

Your primary source of knowledge will be the manual and the built-in discoverability (describe-* functions, or helpful) and of course reading the code. I'm not a manual person myself, but Emacs is one of the examples where it is truly excellent and has answers for almost everything.