RE: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Drew Adams]

> I agree the whole framework around the Emacs documentation is
> great, apart from one thing, that you (or somebody else) possibly
> can help me with:
> 
> When I bring up the help for find-file (just an example, this
> happens all the time), some of the lines are too long. For
> example, one line looks like this:
> 
> Interactively, [cut] type RET is the current director
> 
> That is, "y," has overflowed the width. Is there a way to "fill"
> all help? I tried to manually change some of the docstrings with
> line breaks ("\n", same as in C, or otherwise in Elisp
> strings). That worked, but I'm not going to do that for each and
> any function (or whatever).

Doc strings are supposed to be shorter that some limit.
(elisp) `Documentation Tips' says this:

  Format the documentation string so that it fits in an Emacs window
  on an 80-column screen.  It is a good idea for most lines to be no
  wider than 60 characters.  The first line should not be wider than
  67 characters or it will look bad in the output of `apropos'.

  You can fill the text if that looks good.  However, rather than
  blindly filling the entire documentation string, you can often
  make it much more readable by choosing certain line breaks with
  care.  Use blank lines between sections if the documentation
  string is long.

Likewise, *Help* output, in general.

Wrt filling doc strings, see also user option
`emacs-lisp-docstring-fill-column'.

It sometimes happens that someone writes a doc string that is too
wide.  That is what `M-x report-emacs-bug' is for.