Writing GNU Emacs Extensions

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Nathaniel Borenstein, who helped to dispel my chauvinism about C and taught me an appreciation for the world's amazing variety of programming languages.

Thanks to Richard Stallman for writing Emacs—twice—and who was right about an amazing phenomenon: hackers write better code when it's for their own satisfaction instead of for pay.

Thanks to Mike McInerny, whose stubborn persistence got me started using GNU Emacs—even after several false starts convinced me it wasn't worth my time.

Thanks to Ben Liblit for ideas, code, and bug hunting in my Defer package (which was going to be a chapter in this book until Emacs evolved parallel functionality: the timer package.) Additional help was provided by Simon Marshall, who used and improved on many of the ideas in his defer-lock. Hi, Si.

Thanks to Linda Branagan for showing me it's possible for an ordinary person like me to write a book. (Not that she's ordinary; not even close.)

Thanks to Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon for some insider information about crossword puzzles.

Thanks to all the folks who reviewed and commented on early drafts of this book: Julie Epelboim, Greg Fox, David Hartmann, Bart Schaefer, Ellen Siever, and Steve Webster.

Thanks to my partners at Zanshin Inc. and the Internet Movie Database for allowing me to divide my energies between those projects and this book.

Thanks to my editor, Andy Oram, for coping flexibly with the aforementioned divided energies.

Thanks to Alex, my dog, for curling happily by my feet for much of the writing of this book.

Most of all, to Andrea Dougherty, who encouraged me, supported me, made innumerable sacrifices, performed uncountable services, provided companionship when I needed it and solitude when I needed that (never the other way around), and who in all other respects was good for me and for this book: it must be love.