Re: My emacs was upgraded and I am a novice again

[Emre Sahin]

>>>>> "Eli" == Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:


    Eli> It looks like your keywords should have picked the variable,
    Eli> because its name contains both "mail" and "display".  Can you
    Eli> try to elaborate why you didn't find it, and what commands
    Eli> did you use to search?

C-h d of "display" gives about 10000 lines of text and this doesn't
report "display-time-mail-string" as a variable. C-h d of "mail" is
about 2700 lines of text and this doesn't contain it either. I used
"mode-line" to search also and I didn't understand anything from
mode-line-format variable's value, for example. (There is a format
description with signs like %a, %B, but there is no such thing in the
value, just a set of cryptic functions without any reference to mail.)

    >> However, I don't think there is a silver bullet solution, like
    >> changing the format or adding a "search all documentation"
    >> function for this problem.

    Eli> Sometimes there are variables or functions whose name
    Eli> includes common words, and therefore searching for them
    Eli> brings up a lot of false hits, and you need a certain degree
    Eli> of persistence to not give up too early.

Maybe I gave up early without checking Google, but I used apropos,
apropos-documentation and describe-variable for the keywords I can
think of. As you say, there may be too many hits and I might miss (and
I agree that I'm not a perfect user of documentation), but what I say
is that this problem is not about documentation format and such
technicalities; I think it's a result of "information explosion" and
no perfect communication between user and documentation should be
expected (as no perfect communication between people exists.) One can
only provide better tools but this won't solve the problem perfectly. 

    Eli> In any case, personally, if a few search commands don't give
    Eli> me what I want, I simply look in the sources of the relevant
    Eli> package.  I find this very efficient, since some
    Eli> variables/functions are simply too obscure to be in the docs.

You are right here, but time.el package was not a candidate for
reading in the first sight, I don't expect mail notification in my
mode line has anything to do with time. Once I learned it's about
time documentation was helpful, but without any hint I couldn't think
on my own. 

Thanks,

E.