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Re: Thanks Re: Global keymap not found


From: Eli Zaretskii
Subject: Re: Thanks Re: Global keymap not found
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 2015 12:09:47 +0300

> From: Albrecht Mehl <AlbrechtMehl.spamgrab@iesy.net>
> Date: Fri, 9 Oct 2015 11:07:21 +0200
> 
> Nevertheless I insist
> 
>    - Fundamental things should be available at once and not after
>      hopping from one point to another to another ...

They are.  The Emacs User Manual starts by explaining them in a
methodical way.  It's a lot of stuff to digest, because Emacs is very
large, but if you read enough of the material at the beginning of the
manual, Chapters 1 through 7, you get to know those basics.

>    - The manual should have three appendices - there might be other
>      candidates -
> 
>        1. Alphabetical list of all global (prefix) keys
>        2. Alph. list of all global commands
>        3. List of all global commands grouped according to scope

Such lists would not be useful in Emacs, for 2 main reasons:

 . They would be extremely long lists, so finding anything there would
   be very hard, if at all practical.

 . The lists change depending on what optional packages are loaded.
   Some optional packages are loaded because other packages request
   them automatically on as-needed basis, so these changes can happen
   out of user control.

For these reasons, Emacs provides many help commands that allow you to
look up commands, prefixes, etc. dynamically as needed, and provide
filtering facilities so that the lists you get are relatively short
and focused on the features you are interested in.  I suggest to use
those help commands first, and only go to the manual for further
details, if the built-in documentation is not detailed enough or
leaves some things uncovered.

>    - The chapters in the manual are numerated within the text. So
>      they should be in the table of context as well. People
>      write 'Look at 49.1' e.g. and one wonders where this is.

There's no Table Of Contents in the on-line manual, only in the
printed manual.  The Master Menu (which is what I believe you referred
to) does not show chapter and section names, it shows the node names.

It could make sense to have the TOC produced in the Info format as
well, but that's a feature you/someone should ask the Texinfo
developers to provide, as the programs which produce the manuals are
maintained by another project, not by Emacs.



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