When writing elisp code and looking for a function that would do something you need, what do you use to find it, inside Emacs only (no web search)?
Emacs has a lot of built-in documentation; it has
-
a ,
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an ,
-
-
all code has ,
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for other outside help, it has an excellent support for the man pages with:
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and
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On top of that you can install other complementary packages that add more help search features such as:
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(which is excellent)
There's a lot of commands available with the C-h
or <f1>
key prefix and lots that are not bound by default.
I documented the ones I know and created some others in my system in this PDF:
Despite all of that, every so often, I stumble to find the name of a function that I know exists but can't remember the name. The other day I was looking for the predicate function that tells whether point was at the beginning of line; bolp
.
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I tried typing
beginning
and usingC-M-i
to complete it. That did not work. -
I typed
C-u C-h d
forapropos-documentation
and got a long list of suggestions from which I searched for "beginning .? line" with some regexp and finally I foundbolp
at line 7833 of the Apropos buffer.
I eventually found it, but it took longer than I like. And was very tempted to search the internet or depend on a connection to the outside world (eg, IA). But there must be a better way to quickly find functions in Emacs.
How do *you* quickly find the functions you need *inside Emacs*?