Emacs editing environment, Part 7: Let Emacs help you out

Level: Intermediate

Michael Stutz (stutz@dsl.org), Author, Consultant

13 Nov 2007

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Part 7 of this series shows you why Emacs is the self-documenting editor, and the many ways in which you can take advantage of the help and assistance offered in this editor. In this tutorial, learn about describing keystrokes, commands, and functions. You'll also read, browse, and search through a complete Emacs reference manual.

In this tutorial

• Get help with your keystrokes
  • Learn what a given keystroke is for
  • List all the key bindings that begin with a given prefix
  • Learn which commands you can complete
  • Learn what functions you can type
  • View what you've typed
  • Summary of Emacs keystroke-help commands
  
  
• Get help with Emacs commands and functions
  • Learn which commands are right for a task
  • Learn what a function does
  • Learn what keystroke a function is bound to
  • Summary of Emacs function-help commands
  
  
• Browse Info: the built-in documentation system
  • Start Info
  • Select a node
  • Move in and between nodes
  • Search for a topic
  • Leaving Info
  • Summary of Emacs Info commands
  
  
• Read the documentation files
  • Read about what's new
  • Learn the licensing
  • Learn about the GNU Project
  • Bring up the FAQ
  • Read about obscure problems
  • Summary of Emacs help files
  
  

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Objectives

This tutorial shows you how to obtain help from Emacs in various ways. After working through this tutorial, you'll know how to get descriptions of keystrokes, commands, functions, and read and browse through the many documentation resources that come with this world-famous open source editor.

Prerequisites

Before working through this tutorial, you should complete the previous tutorials in this series. They lay down the basic foundation and explain many of the Emacs concepts you use in this tutorial.

System requirements

This tutorial requires a user account on any UNIX-based system that has a recent copy of Emacs installed.

There are several varieties of Emacs; the original and most popular is GNU Emacs, which is published online by the GNU Project.

You should have a recent copy of GNU Emacs—one that is at version 20 or greater. Versions 20 and 21 are the most commonly available, and development snapshots of version 22 are also available. This tutorial works with any of these versions for Emacs. If your system is running something older, it's time to upgrade.

To know what version of Emacs you have running, use the GNU-style --version flag:

$ emacs --version
GNU Emacs 22.0.91.1
Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GNU Emacs comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You may redistribute copies of Emacs
under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
For more information about these matters, see the file named COPYING.
$ 

You should also have the GNU Emacs documentation installed on your system. Although it's often bundled with the editor, sometimes the Info manual is available separately.

Duration

2 hours

Formats

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