Preventing C-h (help-command) from deactivating the mark?

Preventing C-h (help-command) from deactivating the mark?

[egarrulo]

How to reproduce:
- emacs -Q
- mark some text in *scratch*
- C-h c M-c
- Emacs deactivates the mark and I wish to avoid this.

I would have wrapped `help-command' to bind `deactivate-mark' to nil, 
but Emacs can't find where `help-command' is defined.  Indeed, `help.el' 
defines it as:

(fset 'help-command help-map)

How can I write a wrapper around `help-command'?  Thanks.

Re: Preventing C-h (help-command) from deactivating the mark?

[Barry Margolin]

In article <djtlcjFan1fU1@mid.individual.net>,
 egarrulo <egarrulo@gmail.com> wrote:

> How to reproduce:
> - emacs -Q
> - mark some text in *scratch*
> - C-h c M-c
> - Emacs deactivates the mark and I wish to avoid this.
> 
> I would have wrapped `help-command' to bind `deactivate-mark' to nil, 
> but Emacs can't find where `help-command' is defined.  Indeed, `help.el' 
> defines it as:
> 
> (fset 'help-command help-map)
> 
> How can I write a wrapper around `help-command'?  Thanks.

help-command isn't a function -- when you bind a key to a keymap, that 
makes it a prefix key. C-h is like C-c or C-x.

Put your wrapper around describe-key-briefly, which is the command that 
C-h c runs. It probably doesn't make as much sense to put it around most 
of the other help commands, which display their results in a new window 
instead of just a minibuffer message.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***

Re: Preventing C-h (help-command) from deactivating the mark?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: egarrulo <egarrulo@gmail.com>
> Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2016 15:45:37 +0100
> 
> How to reproduce:
> - emacs -Q
> - mark some text in *scratch*
> - C-h c M-c
> - Emacs deactivates the mark and I wish to avoid this.

This is already fixed in Emacs 25, so if you install the latest
pretest (or wait for 25.1 to be released), your problem will go away.