16 Your .emacs File

“You don’t have to like Emacs to like it”—this seemingly paradoxical statement is the secret of GNU Emacs. The plain, out-of-the-box Emacs is a generic tool. Most people who use it customize it to suit themselves.

GNU Emacs is mostly written in Emacs Lisp; this means that by writing expressions in Emacs Lisp you can change or extend Emacs.