D. Tips and Conventions

This chapter describes no additional features of Emacs Lisp. Instead it gives advice on making effective use of the features described in the previous chapters, and describes conventions Emacs Lisp programmers should follow.

You can automatically check some of the conventions described below by running the command M-x checkdoc RET when visiting a Lisp file. It cannot check all of the conventions, and not all the warnings it gives necessarily correspond to problems, but it is worth examining them all.

D.1 Emacs Lisp Coding Conventions		Conventions for clean and robust programs.
D.2 Tips for Making Compiled Code Fast		Making compiled code run fast.
D.3 Tips for Documentation Strings		Writing readable documentation strings.
D.4 Tips on Writing Comments		Conventions for writing comments.
D.5 Conventional Headers for Emacs Libraries		Standard headers for library packages.