Re: Is it legal to set `help-char' to nil?

[Michael Heerdegen]

YE Qianchuan <stool.ye@gmail.com> writes:

> Well, I can't even enter term-mode.
> I can reproduce it in this way:
> 1. open emacs without initial files (emacs -Q)
> 2. eval (setq help-char nil)
> 3. type M-x term
> Then it throw an error: Wrong type argument: characterp, nil.
> If you don't have this problem, maybe it's a bug in trunk.

I can reproduce this.  The error happens when loading "ehelp", here, in
the definition of `electric-help-map':

(define-key map (char-to-string help-char) 'electric-help-help)

Similar examples are spread over diverse other elisp files.  So, we know
now that Emacs indeed assumes that `help-char' is a character (and not
nil), so nil is not allowed as a value.

I don't have a better solution than to bind `help-char' to a different
character.  You could also create a bug report - I think what you want
could be made possible, but I don't know if emacs-dev would do it.


Regards,

Michael.