Date: Mon, 25 Aug 1997 11:23:45 +0300 (IDT) From: Eli Zaretskii To: Paul Derbyshire cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: Syntax-help in emacs In-Reply-To: <5tp1q6$rv9@freenet-news.carleton.ca> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Precedence: bulk On 24 Aug 1997, Paul Derbyshire wrote: > Is there a way to twiddle the .emacs file to get, say, ctrl-f1 to look up > the word under the point in the info files? i.e., so if the cursor is on > printf, it finds there's a node printf, in the libc .inf files. With Emacs, the question isn't whether there *is* a way--of course there is--but *how* ;-). The following is courtesy of John Aldrich. Put it somewhere in your _emacs: ;;; Automatic online help for library functions (autoload 'find-tag-tag "etags") (autoload 'Info-find-node "info") (defun libc-help (arg) (interactive (list (find-tag-tag "C library topic: "))) (Info-find-node "libc" arg)) (define-key c-mode-map [C-f1] 'libc-help) It prompts with the word at point as the default. Press RET if that's what you want, or type another function name and press RET. A simple addition to this will show the help in another window; this is left as an excercise to the interested readers ;-). > I checked the emacs FAQ but couldn't find anything referring to > contect-sensitive or syntax help. I also looked through the command lists > under emacs and cc-mode, nothing there, Unix people have man pages installed, so they just type "Alt-x man RET" and get the man page for the function at point. That's why they didn't worry about this. > there are some info-this-that > commands for elisp functions, but none for c, c++ etc functions, nor any > obvious way to feed it the word under the point... If you want to program in ELisp, I suggest to get the Emacs Lisp reference (elisp-manual-NN.MM.tar.gz from GNU ftp sites). You don't need to read it in its entirety (it's HUGE), but searching through it always helps me find what I want.