The Craft of Text Editing: Emacs for the Modern World (1999)

This might be more accurately titled &quot;The Craft of Making Text Editors.&quot; It is mostly not about Emacs, rather about more abstract ideas around user interface (see the quaint Joystick section) and text editing:<p>&gt; This model is the basic two-dimensional form. Instead of editing a line, the user is editing in a quarter-plane, with the origin usually in the upper-left corner. Conceptually, the user can move freely in the two-dimensional quadrant. In practice, the editor usually only stores the non-blank portions, as storing an infinite-quadrant&#x27;s worth of data can be prohibitively expensive. Some systems may impose fixed upper bounds on the width or length of the quadrant.<p>Sure, that&#x27;s fine I guess, but this doesn&#x27;t help me understand how to use or program Emacs. And most of the code is in C, not Elisp.

After having used Emacs exclusively at work for a few years, I am in the process of switching to Sublime Text full time. ST delivers solidly on the excellent concepts that Emacs helped pioneer, including multiple cursors and using generic text buffers for every task. Plus it made the smart move of making ido-mode built-in (and improving its algorithm greatly in my experience).

I read this book in college and was captivated. Not terribly long, but fascinating for learning how the insides of our tools work (or could work better).