Please reproduce this issue in
emacs -Q.
This is a sentence you will often read when you report bugs in Emacs packages; it's often a quick reply from a developer and goes with no further explanation or even the slightest clue on what you’re supposed to do. If you ever found yourself in that situation then this post is for you: I’ll explain what it means to “reproduce a bug in emacs -Q”, how to do that properly, and why developers ask you for this.
Emacs isn't just an editor, it’s an entire Emacs Lisp interpreter and environment. We can use Emacs Lisp not only to extend and customize our beloved editor, but also to write entire programs and applications. Nic Ferrier’s [elnode][] server is the most ambitious Emacs Lisp application of this sort, but we can start at a smaller scale and try to write our shell scripts and tools with Emacs Lisp.
Emacs Lisp offers an autoloading mechanism to load libraries on demand. Typically this is used to make interactive commands available to the user without entirely loading the corresponding library upfront. This article explores how autoloads work and how Emacs Lisp packages use autoloads to improve load speed.