On 21/09/2007, Eli Zaretskii gnu.org> wrote:

For me, that sums up one of the quirks of emacs. Its way of hiding
its light under the proverbial bushel.

Each time I come across one of these features (e.g. auto-revert-mode yesterday)
I note it down and am likely to use it.

Has anyone documented the feature list (without going on to extensions)
that is present in the 'out of the box' emacs?
I swear I could use emacs for 20 years and still find out new things
that I could find useful.

RTFM won't cut it Tim .

I'm not even sure how such a list might be documented. I'd go looking for
auto-revert-mode under 'refresh' or some such.

Is it worthwhile? Probably not if you're content with emacs.

regards

Dave Pawson wrote:

yup. i'm not going on 20 yet (it's just about 7 years, i reckon), but i
think emacs is one of those things that you'll never know everything
about...

it's one of the reasons why i read emacs news groups. learn something new
every day! ;-)

I've been an Emacs maintainer for what... 10 years?
I still occasionally bump into a bundled *package* that I've never heard of.

Stefan

Stefan> I've been an Emacs maintainer for what... 10 years? I still
Stefan> occasionally bump into a bundled *package* that I've never
Stefan> heard of.

Most long-time Emacs users I talk to have a similar experience. I
think this is one of the great joys of Emacs.

On the minus side, discoverability remains a problem. Sometimes I
wish I'd found those features years earlier.

Tom

On 21/09/2007, Tom Tromey redhat.com> wrote:

That's the problem I'm trying to address.
If the list members could provide the 'clues' I'm more than willing
to collate them, or perhaps we could use a wiki or some other web site
to collect them?

Ideas for an 'index' please? What form? Its the match of 'idea/usage'
vs package name/variable/mode. Generally once you have the key words,
emacs is sufficiently helpful?

regards

Instead of inventing new machinery, how about enhancing the existing
one? "C-h P" is supposed to use the index you seem to think about.

On 22/09/2007, Eli Zaretskii gnu.org> wrote:

Good example, both counts.
No sign of revert (even if I understood it to mean reload).
And I'd never heard of C-h P. As I said, I'd need to know the magic
word 'revert'
to find revert. That's the index I think is missing.

Not enough for me Eli, but another one to add to the list :-)

regards

Sorry, I don't understand what you are talking about: what revert?

If you are looking for the place to learn Emacs parlance, there's the
"Glossary" node in the manual (which does explain "revert").

On 22/09/2007, Eli Zaretskii gnu.org> wrote:

The minor mode that resolved the issue at the top of this thread, for Steve?
auto-revert-mode

I don't think the problem is with generating the documentation. Emacs
already has a huge body of documentation, both in the doc strings and
in the manuals that are part of the distribution.