unofficial mirror of help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Thanks Re: Global keymap not found
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 2015 12:09:47 +0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <834mhzt7hg.fsf@gnu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <mv8049$bdc$1@news.albasani.net>

> From: Albrecht Mehl <AlbrechtMehl.spamgrab@iesy.net>
> Date: Fri, 9 Oct 2015 11:07:21 +0200
> 
> Nevertheless I insist
> 
>    - Fundamental things should be available at once and not after
>      hopping from one point to another to another ...

They are.  The Emacs User Manual starts by explaining them in a
methodical way.  It's a lot of stuff to digest, because Emacs is very
large, but if you read enough of the material at the beginning of the
manual, Chapters 1 through 7, you get to know those basics.

>    - The manual should have three appendices - there might be other
>      candidates -
> 
>        1. Alphabetical list of all global (prefix) keys
>        2. Alph. list of all global commands
>        3. List of all global commands grouped according to scope

Such lists would not be useful in Emacs, for 2 main reasons:

 . They would be extremely long lists, so finding anything there would
   be very hard, if at all practical.

 . The lists change depending on what optional packages are loaded.
   Some optional packages are loaded because other packages request
   them automatically on as-needed basis, so these changes can happen
   out of user control.

For these reasons, Emacs provides many help commands that allow you to
look up commands, prefixes, etc. dynamically as needed, and provide
filtering facilities so that the lists you get are relatively short
and focused on the features you are interested in.  I suggest to use
those help commands first, and only go to the manual for further
details, if the built-in documentation is not detailed enough or
leaves some things uncovered.

>    - The chapters in the manual are numerated within the text. So
>      they should be in the table of context as well. People
>      write 'Look at 49.1' e.g. and one wonders where this is.

There's no Table Of Contents in the on-line manual, only in the
printed manual.  The Master Menu (which is what I believe you referred
to) does not show chapter and section names, it shows the node names.

It could make sense to have the TOC produced in the Info format as
well, but that's a feature you/someone should ask the Texinfo
developers to provide, as the programs which produce the manuals are
maintained by another project, not by Emacs.



  parent reply	other threads:[~2015-10-10  9:09 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 21+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2015-10-07  8:03 Global keymap not found Albrecht Mehl
2015-10-07  8:46 ` Marco Wahl
2015-10-07  9:28   ` Michael Heerdegen
     [not found]   ` <mailman.45.1444210137.916.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
2015-10-07 11:19     ` Marco Wahl
2015-10-07 15:01 ` Tassilo Horn
2015-10-07 15:12   ` Drew Adams
2015-10-08  6:27 ` Albrecht Mehl
2015-10-08  8:53   ` Michael Heerdegen
     [not found]   ` <mailman.7.1444294440.4386.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
2015-10-08 14:36     ` Thanks " Albrecht Mehl
2015-10-08 14:46       ` Loris Bennett
2015-10-08 15:08         ` Michael Heerdegen
     [not found]         ` <mailman.69.1444347042.4386.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
2015-10-09  9:13           ` Marco Wahl
2015-10-08 17:09       ` Drew Adams
2015-10-09  9:07       ` Albrecht Mehl
2015-10-09 20:12         ` Tassilo Horn
2015-10-09 20:21           ` Emanuel Berg
2015-10-09 20:18         ` Emanuel Berg
2015-10-09 20:45         ` Drew Adams
2015-10-10  9:09         ` Eli Zaretskii [this message]
2015-10-10  9:32         ` Michael Heerdegen
2015-10-10 12:02           ` Kaushal Modi

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

  List information: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=834mhzt7hg.fsf@gnu.org \
    --to=eliz@gnu.org \
    --cc=help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).