Do I need to know Emacs Lisp in order to use GNU/Emacs

Question

Recently, I began studying GNU/Emacs. Was very easy to use program. Studied its structure. Tuned nice color for me. Configure it to class on C programming. Everything seemed normal. But now the question arose of GNU/Emacs lisp. Should I really spend time to study Emacs Lisp if I did not develop itself Emacs and will only use it like ide for C/C++ development, mail, jabber and etc...

The fact is that when I edit my .emacs I understand that I write. But I write mostly ready-made scripts or if its something they are very simple.

Thank you.

Answer 1

No, it's not strictly necessary. You will probably write elisp, but mostly just set variables and insert the necessary snippets for any mode or package you want to use (setq, require etc). Most of that is done by copying and pasting, so no real knowledge of elisp is required.

Having said that, defining small functions can be quite useful, and learning enough Emacs Lisp for that might prove useful. Look at Xah Lee's tutorial, it's quite short and succinct.