Re: Search multiple Info-buffers at once with Info-occur function

[Augusto Stoffel <arstoffel@gmail.com>]

On Sat, 29 May 2021 at 16:29, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

>> The only downside of info-look (and I guess this is inherent to the info
>> format, or to long-form documentation is general) is that you can't just
>> pick a random collection of manuals to search for symbols.  Instead,
>> there's a manually curated list of modes (via
>> `info-lookup-maybe-add-help') with recipes as to what constitutes a
>> symbol in that manual.
>
> That's true, but how else can Emacs possibly know which manual(s)
> is/are relevant to a random symbol or major mode?  Eventually, you
> must have some DB of data that connects these dots, and info-look.el
> provides the infrastructure to maintain and extend such a DB.  Right?
> Or am I missing something?

That's inevitable, of course.  The "evdocs" package I just submitted
here will just ask you which manual(s) to search; alternatively, you can
set a variable, say in a major mode hook, to avoid that question.

But what I find a bit annoying is something else, namely the fact that
info-look.el defines a bunch of regexps to decide what constitutes a
symbol in each manual.  So you can't just say "oh, by the way, please
include also the manual of the Dash library when I'm in Elisp mode"
(unless there's something else I'm missing...).