Re: Emacs Telling You the Kind of the Variable Under the Cursor?

[Anselm Helbig <anselm.helbig+news2009@googlemail.com>]

Hi!

> The email title almost says it all.
> I read in a slashdot post that you can configure Emacs so that it will 
> tell you/display somewhere (there were no details in that post) the type 
> of the variable under the cursor.
> This sounds handy, but I have no idea how to activate this feature 
> (given but not granted that it exists really).
> Any hints?

I think you're looking for eldoc-mode. I've got this in my .emacs:

(mapc (lambda (mode-hook) 
        (add-hook mode-hook 'turn-on-eldoc-mode))
      '(emacs-lisp-mode-hook lisp-interaction-mode-hook ielm-mode-hook))

In principle this is not limited to elisp, you can implement this
functionality for any language/major-mode, I did a toy implementation
for PHP once.

HTH, 

Anselm


-- 
Anselm Helbig 
mailto:anselm.helbig+news2009@googlemail.com