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Ask HN: I have info and loads of manuals in Emacs, how do I use them?

18 points by noobermin ↗ HN
Emacs famously has so many features and most mature packages you find have decent documentation, yet whenever I need to look for a new package or information on say org-mode, I find myself just googling it because C-h a (which I default go to) doesn't whittle things fast enough.

How can I use emacs info and friends more effectively? Specifically in looking up docs on already installed packages? Asking here because this might end up being useful to others.

6 comments

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neilv
For software already installed, Emacs should have an index of all your "info" format documents, usually bound to "C-h i".

Then you can use "m" or "C-s" to find the manual you want.

I don't think there's any stock full-text search of all installed manuals at once, but, once you're in a manual, then the various means of navigation are usually very efficient, and (sadly) generally better than most manuals in HTML.

dmartincy
You can run M-x info-apropos to search in all known Info files at once:

"Grovel indices of all known Info files on your system for STRING. Build a menu of the possible matches."

jolmg
"m" is to select a menu item from the list presented on the current page. "C-s" is for text search across the whole manual. And then there is "i" which is to search in the index of the manual.
hprotagonist
helm-apropos is nice(r) for flipping through commands, too.
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codemac
I actually do C-h i, then C-s for package name. Then RET on the package name, then C-s <term> RET and hit C-s repeatedly until I'm near a page node that seems reasonable.

Also, C-h C-h will show you the help of help commands.

M-x apropos-value is crucial when you don't know what variable it is, but you know it's somewhere.