One thing I like about Emacs is that when I ask for information, the default case is that it is displayed in a section (which Emacs calls a “window”) of the window (which Emacs calls a “frame”) that I’m already focused on. What’s nice about this is that if I ask for, say, help on a symbol in C mode, the information will show up, but I don’t have to look away, or worry about a new window stealing the focus, or move the mouse around. Also, I can easily dismiss the display without moving my hands from the keyboard.

Do you know about help on symbol in C mode? I didn’t know about this until last week. If you are in a C mode buffer, you can type C-h S, aka info-lookup-symbol, to look up help for a given C symbol. This works by digging through the libc info pages… this isn’t perfect, but it is pretty handy. (And, yes, I’m one of the few people who really loves info and uses it every day. I wish all the documentation on my system were available in this format — plus one or two others, yet to be invented, which would allow better IDE-ish features in Emacs.)

On a related note, a couple days Kevin Ryde sent me the latest version of gtk-look.el for uploading into ELPA. I’ve been meaning to try this for a while, so I finally installed it. gtk-lookup-symbol is similar to info-lookup-symbol, except it uses the devhelp documentation libraries as its source. Great stuff!

Naturally, I could just use devhelp, which is a very nice tool. Unfortunately, it is a very nice tool with one major drawback — it makes a new window, with all the attendant problems. And, by default, gtk-look suffers from this problem as well; the docs show up in firefox.

Luckily, Emacs is absurdly configurable, and this problem is solved by installing the w3m-el package (on Fedora) and configuring browse-url-browser-function to display devhelp files in w3m:

(setq browse-url-browser-function

    '(("file:.*/usr/local/share/gtk-doc/html" . w3m-browse-url)

     ("file:.*/usr/share/gtk-doc/html" . w3m-browse-url)

     ("." . browse-url-firefox)))

With this I can easily view the help for gtk, glib, etc, functions in the Emacs-y way that I prefer. If this sounds good to you, you’re only seconds away from installing it via ELPA.

Now what I need is c-lookup-symbol-dwim, which searches all the databases. This shouldn’t be too hard…