Re: My emacs was upgraded and I am a novice again

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Emre Sahin <iesahin@bilkent.edu.tr>
> Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 01:41:04 +0300
> 
> Yesterday I convinced myself that removing the "Mail" notification in
> the mode line will help for less distraction. I started by checking
> the documentation with C-h d, C-h a, C-h v and C-h P with words like
> "mail", "display", "notification" etc. My intention was to find some
> variable that says Emacs "don't show this mail thing."

It looks like your keywords should have picked the variable, because
its name contains both "mail" and "display".  Can you try to elaborate
why you didn't find it, and what commands did you use to search?

> However, I don't think there is a silver bullet solution, like
> changing the format or adding a "search all documentation" function
> for this problem.

Sometimes there are variables or functions whose name includes common
words, and therefore searching for them brings up a lot of false hits,
and you need a certain degree of persistence to not give up too early.

In any case, personally, if a few search commands don't give me what I
want, I simply look in the sources of the relevant package.  I find
this very efficient, since some variables/functions are simply too
obscure to be in the docs.