Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>]

wgreenhouse@riseup.net (W. Greenhouse) writes:

> Right, I was referring to the describe-* family of commands, the
> apropos-* commands, and the
> find-function/find-library/find-variable/find-face-definition
> commands, as well as the Customize system.  I realize that
> documentation doesn't write itself, that the parameters of a
> function on their own may be rather mysterious, and that
> machine-generated documentation generally sucks.  Nonetheless,
> Emacs provides the user with an unusually rich set of ways of
> finding out about the environment's current state and the
> workings and customization possibilities of a program, as well
> as discovering things you didn't know you were looking for.  I
> take "self-documenting" to mean "capable of introspection in a
> variety of context-useful ways".  If we updated the Emacs
> one-line description for 2013, we'd probably call it the
> "extensible, customizable, introspective editor".  Or not--that
> makes it sound like a neurotic existentialist writer!

Ha ha, no, let's keep "self-documenting". To me, that *sounds*
like "you don't have to write documentation, Emacs does that for
you, all the while you extend Emacs", but I never was fool enough
to believe that (for Emacs, or any system), so I thought it was
just an exaggeration of the docstring etc. functionality, and
especially its "immediate" update property, or, likewise an
exaggeration of the prototypes you get, even if there is no
docstring - I guess you could include lots of stuff in
"self-documentation", with some imagination - autocompletion, for
example (which I never use for speed, only when I don't remember
some part of whatever name).

I agree the whole framework around the Emacs documentation is
great, apart from one thing, that you (or somebody else) possibly
can help me with:

When I bring up the help for find-file (just an example, this
happens all the time), some of the lines are too long. For
example, one line looks like this:

Interactively, [cut] type RET is the current director

That is, "y," has overflowed the width. Is there a way to "fill"
all help? I tried to manually change some of the docstrings with
line breaks ("\n", same as in C, or otherwise in Elisp
strings). That worked, but I'm not going to do that for each and
any function (or whatever).

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573