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1.10 Online Help

Hemlock has a fairly good online documentation facility. You can get brief documentation for every command, variable, character attribute, and key by typing a key.

Command: Help (bound to Home, C-_)

This command prompt for a key-event indicating one of a number of other documentation commands. The following are valid responses:

a

List commands and other things whose names contain a specified keyword.

d

Give the documentation and bindings for a specified command.

g

Give the documentation for any Hemlock thing.

v

Give the documentation for a Hemlock variable and its values.

c

Give the documentation for a command bound to some key.

l

List the last sixty key-events typed.

m

Give the documentation for a mode followed by a short description of its mode-specific bindings.

p

Give the documentation and bindings for commands that have at least one binding involving a mouse/pointer key-event.

w

List all the key bindings for a specified command.

t

Describe a LISP object.

q

Quit without doing anything.

Home, C-_, ?, h

List all of the options and what they do.

Command: Apropos (bound to Home a, C-_ a)

This command prints brief documentation for all commands, variables, and character attributes whose names match the input. This performs a prefix match on each supplied word separately, intersecting the names in each word’s result. For example, giving Apropos "f m" causes it to tersely describe following commands and variables:

  • Auto Fill Mode
  • Fundamental Mode
  • Mark Form
  • Default Modeline Fields
  • Fill Mode Hook
  • Fundamental Mode Hook

Notice Mark Form demonstrates that the "f" words may follow the "m" order of the fields does not matter for Apropos.

The bindings of commands and values of variables are printed with the documentation.

Command: Describe Command (bound to Home d, C-_ d)

This command prompts for a command and prints its full documentation and all the keys bound to it.

Command: Describe Key (bound to Home c, C-_ c, M-?)

This command prints full documentation for the command which is bound to the specified key in the current environment.

Command: Describe Mode (bound to Home m, C-_ m)

This command prints the documentation for a mode followed by a short description of each of its mode-specific bindings.

Command: Show Variable
Command: Describe and Show Variable

Show Variable prompts for the name of a variable and displays the global value of the variable, the value local to the current buffer (if any), and the value of the variable in all defined modes that have it as a local variable. Describe and Show Variable displays the variable’s documentation in addition to the values.

Command: What Lossage (bound to Home l, C-_ l)

This command displays the last sixty key-events typed. This can be useful if, for example, you are curious what the command was that you typed by accident.

Command: Describe Pointer

This command displays the documentation and bindings for commands that have some binding involving a mouse/pointer key-event. It will not show the documentation for the Illegal command regardless of whether it has a pointer binding.

Command: Where Is (bound to Home w, C-_ w)

This command prompts for the name of a command and displays its key bindings in a pop-up window. If a key binding is not global, the environment in which it is available is displayed.

Command: Generic Describe (bound to Home g, C-_ g)

This command prints full documentation for any thing that has documentation. It first prompts for the kind of thing to document, the following options being available:

attribute

Describe a character attribute, given its name.

command

Describe a command, given its name.

key

Describe a command, given a key to which it is bound.

variable

Describe a variable, given its name. This is the default.


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