Re: Inabilty to locate desktop.el

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Tue, 12 Jun 2001, Ivan Mahon wrote:

> Eli alsked me to post the keywords I used to attempt to find desktop.el (and
> failed).

Thanks for taking time to describe how you searched for it.

> I started with the customisation system and found save-places in the data
> sub-group. I would probably expect this to be in convenience but I'm sure
> there is a good reason. I basically read almost all the customisation tree
> (looking for what was available - I am used to previous versions). I must
> have missed the desktop bit (it may not be there - I haven't gotten back to
> the machine with emacs on yet) so I ended up using apropos  and plain old
> grep in the lisp directory (keywords such as save places, reload, reinstate,
> remember, restore). Most just had too many hits to be useful. My guess is
> that a useful place to mention desktop restore would be save-places (because
> it appeals to the same mindset I think), otherwise somewhere in
> customisation under convenience.

Going to Customize is not the best way to look for a feature when you
are not sure what's its name, because it's fairly hard to find without
knowing a name of a variable or a function you are looking for.  (The
customization group of desktop is under Environment->Frames, which is
not easy to guess.)

The recommended way to find a feature whose name is not known is to
search the manual using the Info-index command, bound to the `i' key.
desktop.el is mentioned in the manual, and typing "i saving session RET"
would land you on the right spot.

Based on your description, I now added a couple more index entries
leading to that section.