IMO, it should describe much more Info-mode commands. Without using
the manual, the Emacs help system is quite crippled, especially for
newbies. Doc strings not always target newbies, because they cannot
be too wordy (due to considerations of memory footprint of the running
Emacs).

Eli Zaretskii gnu.org> writes:

Uh what? Doc strings are not placed in the memory of Emacs except for
those of uncompiled Lisp code.

You mean, when I'm looking at a buffer that displays the doc string of
something, that doc string is not in memory?

Eli Zaretskii gnu.org> writes:

Only as long as the help buffer persists with this content. Do you
really claim the ephemeral size of the help buffer to be an important
consideration concerning the size of DOC strings?

Do you really claim that the size of DOC strings is of no concern at
all?

Eli Zaretskii gnu.org> writes:

Since they reside in the .elc files and/or the DOC file and are only
ever loaded into memory temporarily when they are actually consulted,
they take up only disk space, not main memory. Just like the manual.

So yes, I disagree with the following claim of you that you made in
the thread and seemingly already forgot:

Doc strings not always target newbies, because they cannot be too
wordy (due to considerations of memory footprint of the running
Emacs).

Perhaps you should re-read th relevant sources before you make such
assertions. What I see there is that each displayed doc string is
kept in memory twice, and it remains in memory until the next GC.

So, temporary or not, the doc strings do in fact occupy memory for
more than a split second.

Yes.

Stefan

Absolutely negligible. If you add 10KB to a docstring (i.e. a *lot* more
text), that will add in the order of 10-20KB to the Emacs process on the
conditions that the user has looked at that docstring. I.e. it will bump
the process's size from maybe 10MB to 10.02MB. If you add 10KB to each and
every docstring ever written, then the process size will grow by about 10KB
times the number of docstring viewed in *Help*.
Absolutely negligible.

Stefan

Eli Zaretskii gnu.org> writes: