RE: How to get skills in elisp ?

[Benjamin Badgley <mortecanine@peoplepc.com>]

Not flaming Drew, only stating fact. I still use a dial up with a serial 
modem. It's okay for our needs presently. Rather, it needs to be.

That aside, I have been delving into the lovely world of load path. 
Seems I've gotten a rather long group listing for a load path. Any ideas 
on how to wrangle it back down to perhaps two or so directories? Not 
sure where to go to set it for Emacs itself. My dot emacs file evaluates 
out the long path listing.

I want to finish hacking the dot emacs and then byte compile it, set a 
new dot emacs up.

;;; Included in the new dot emacs
(require 'emacs-source.elc)

That will cut down load time. If I keep the original dot emacs then, I 
can add / subtract and recompile as needed. Besides that it'll save 
running into evaluation errors when it loads a simple one or two line 
dot emacs file.

However, that darn load path issue bugs me. And I may be taking the long 
way home. Please let me if that's the case, it's how I learn. But no 
need to indulge stupidity either, if you can offer some help, pointers 
please do.

So far my favorite line of code is the one below.

(setq inhibit-startup-message t)

And I also enjoy:

(add-to-list 'load-path 
"/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/emacs-goodies-el/color-theme.el")
(require 'color-theme)
(eval-after-load "color-theme-wheat"
  (progn (color-theme-hober))

As for finding useful documentation, I find myself doing a  C-h i a lot. 
It helped get me started on hacking the dot emacs file. I stumbled over 
the Emacs FAQ via the C-h i key-chord.  With auto decompress on in Emacs 
you can read compressed info files just swell. I bet it would also work 
on those pesky compressed man pages, too. ;)

Well, I ought to be scooting along. Need to break tomorrow, do some 
writing instead of coding.  Nitol, run it slow.  :)

;;; Ben