Re: Learning emacs sources

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Chong Yidong writes:
 > tiefeng wu <icebergwtf@gmail.com> writes:
 > 
 > > I'm interesting to know implementation of emacs.  I downloaded source
 > > of version 22.3, but honestly, source files are too complicated for
 > > me.
 > >
 > > Any introduce view of emacs structure design or any advise will be
 > > appreciated.
 > 
 > Reading the source in one go is probably not feasible.  If you are
 > interested in how one particular part of Emacs works, a good strategy is
 > to read the relevant part of the Lisp manual, try to formulate a set of
 > specific questions, then ask this mailing list.

If you want to understand the design overview, then

    http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html

(the basic textbook for "Emacs 101", authored by Richard Stallman) and

    http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals_14.html

(somewhat more implementation-specific and up-to-date) are good
summaries.  For internals from the inside out the latter is a good
place to start.  You will find that implementation details are
somewhat divergent from (GNU) Emacs, but important things like naming
conventions (eg, 'why do identifiers start with "Q", "S", "V", or
"F"?') and the relation of the Emacs event loop to the traditional
read-eval-print loop are gathered in one convenient place here.  When
you start recognizing divergences between the XEmacs docs and the
Emacs implementation, you can be pretty sure you've understood enough
to switch to just reading Emacs source. :-)