Re: finding stuff

[doltes doltes]

If I would really need to search all Emacs files, I would do the
following: Download the source code repository and execute =grep=
there but in all this time I've been using Emacs, I've never felt the
need to do this.

Apparently, what you were trying to find was a section in the Emacs
info manual and you knew some keywords but wasn't able to find the
Info heading. What I would do is the following:

1. Visit the =Emacs= info file. That is, execute =info-emacs-manual=
   (or press =C-h r=)
2. Execute =Info-toc= (or press =T=)
3. Execute =occur= (or press =M-s o=) while being in the =Table of
   Contents=.
4. Search the keywords I want to know about. In this scenario, they
   would be: =local variables=.

If no occurrence were found, I would repeat the same process with the
=Elisp= info manual.

If you want to actually search a given regexp in all info manuals, you
can try the following command. I would call this the brute-force
method. If you haven't set the =$INFOPATH= environmental variable,
then just use =/usr/share/info= as your =$path_info=.

#+begin_src dash
path_info="$(printf "%s" "$INFOPATH" | tr ":" "\n")"

pattern="emacs"
flags="--color"

find $path_info \
  -type f \( \
    ! \( -name '*.png' -o -name '*.gz' \) -exec grep "$flags" -- "$pattern"
{} + \
    -o -name '*.gz' -exec zgrep "$flags" -- "$pattern" {} + \
  \)
#+end_src



On Tue, 26 Jan 2021 at 10:09, John Yates <john@yates-sheets.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 25, 2021 at 8:59 PM Robert Thorpe
> <rt@robertthorpeconsulting.com> wrote:
> >
> > Alternatively, info-apropos could be associated with C-h C-i by
> > default.  As far as I can tell there is nothing that uses that binding
> > in vanilla Emacs.
>
> My suggestion to repurpose 'C-h I' was to conform to the pattern
> in that table of binding wherein an uppercase letter implements a
> deeper, more verbose version of its lowercase counterpart.  Such
> patterns facilitate (my) memorization.
>
>