Actually what I meant was, I want to run lisp forms from within emacs. Eg, (global-set-key "\C-\M-z" 'delete-whole-line). There must be a Lisp engine running within Emacs that interprets this form when it is in the .emacs init file. Can I send lisp forms to this engine at any given time during an Emacs session? I know global-set-key can be run from M-x but it's interactive, I'd like to be able to enter the above form manually.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: B. T. Raven <nihil@nihilo.net>
Date: Tue, May 20, 2008 at 2:32 PM
Subject: Re: Running .emacs style commands within emacs
To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org


Ben Forbes wrote:
In my .emacs init file I have commands like

(fset 'delete-whole-line "\C-a\C-k\C-k")


How can I run a command like this from within emacs? It doesn't seem to be
recognized when I try "M-x fset".



This is just the expression generated when you save a macro. Try C-h f 'delete-whole-line and a *Help buffer will show this. You could shorten the macro name to 'dln and it would work the same. Try this and then invoke with M-x dln. So it's just go to beginning of line, kill line, kill newline. You can define keyboard macros and not save them if you need them for only one session.

Ed