Re: Some ideas with Emacs

[Michael Welsh Duggan]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>, Stefan Kangas <address@hidden>,
>>  Anonymous <address@hidden>, Emacs developers <address@hidden>
>> From: Clément Pit-Claudel <address@hidden>
>> Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2019 16:42:28 -0500
>> 
>> would be great would be if there were links to the manual from the
>> docstrings for functions that are covered in both.
>
> Almost all of them are, so it would be a significant bloat of the
> Emacs's memory footprint for very little gain.  I suggest that you
> instead teach yourself to use "C-h S" every time you wonder whether a
> function or variable is described in the manual(s): this command
> sounds like exactly what you'd want.  (If you already use it, I guess
> I don't understand what would you gain by having the information in
> the doc string.)

Although not trivial to write, this might be able to be auto-generated
to some extent.  If the function being looked up is an internal function
or the file in which the function is implemented is in the emacs
installed lisp files location (usually
$prefix/share/emacs/$VERSION/lisp), then we could look up the function
in them emacs-lisp manual and, if found, we could add a link to that
entry.  This could be implemented in the
`help-fns-describe-function-functions' hook.  The manual look-up would
be a hacked up version of `Info-index` which requires an exact match.
Something similar would be done for variable look-up (in
`help-fns-describe-variable-functions').

I'm not in a position where I could write this myself, but I thought I'd
throw the idea out there in case someone else is interested in writing
such a thing.

-- 
Michael Welsh Duggan
(address@hidden)