Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition

Chapter 14. The Help System

Emacs has the most comprehensive help facility of any text editor—and one of the best such facilities of any program at all. In fact, the Emacs help facilities probably cut down the time it took for us to write this book by an order of magnitude, and they can help you immeasurably in your ongoing quest to learn more about Emacs.

In this chapter, we describe Emacs help in the following areas:

• The tutorial.

• The help key (C-h) and Help menu, which allow you to get help on a wide variety of topics.

• The help facilities of complex commands like query-replace and dired.

• Navigating Emacs manuals and using the info documentation reader.

• Completion, in which Emacs helps you finish typing names of functions, variables, filenames, and more. Completion not only saves you time and helps you complete names of functions you know about but can help you discover new commands and variables.

Using the Tutorial

If you are just starting out with Emacs, check out the tutorial by typing C-h t (for help-with-tutorial), which deletes all extra windows (leaving just one) and starts up a learn-by-doing tutorial. Actually, it displays a file called TUTORIAL in the window. The tutorial is currently available in 21 languages. The tutorial provides an introduction to the following Emacs features:

• Basic cursor motion

• Delete and yank

• Visiting and saving files

• Buffers

• Text and auto-fill modes

• Incremental search

• Basic help commands

You might want to use the tutorial along with Chapter 1 and Chapter ...