Help Within Emacs

Remarks#

Emacs is described as a self-documenting editor, and provides lots of information on how to use it within the editor itself. Amongst the entry points to this documentation is a tutorial, information about what functions is available related to a given topic,a information about the bindings between keystrokes and functions.The documentation is accessed using the prefix C-h, i.e. Ctrl h, or F1, with a list of further choices available by pressing ?

Emacs Tutorial

C-h t runs the function help-with-tutorial, which opens a buffer containing a tutorial on the basic editing functionality of emacs, including moving around in text, and working with files, buffers, and windows.

Available Functions and Key Bindings

Pressing C-h a will run the emacs function apropos-command which makes emacs prompt for words (or a regexp) to search for. It will then show a buffer containing a list of names and descriptions related to that topic, including key bindings for each of the functions available via keystrokes.

Pressing C-h m (describe-mode) gives a buffer describing the major and minor modes in effect, including listings of available functions and their key bindings.

Pressing C-h b (describe-bindings) gives a buffer listing all current key bindings. The listing includes global bindings as well as bindings for the active major and minor modes in the current buffer.

Key Binding Documentation

C-h k runs the function describe-key, which looks up the function mapped to the key strokes provided, and presents a description of the function which will be run when these keys are pressed.

C-h c runs the function describe-key-briefly, which only displays the function name mapped to given key sequence.

Function Documentation

C-h f runs the function describe-function, which displays information on the usage and purpose of a given function. This is especially useful for functions that do not have a mapped key binding that can be used for documentation lookup via C-h k.