Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts

[Stefan Reichör]

Hi Miles!

> Stefan Reichör <address@hidden> writes:
>> Now you can hit f1 when a minibuffer prompt is displayed and you get
>> the function's docstring.
>
> It's kind of a neat idea, but F1 doesn't seem like a great
> key-binding to me...

Yes, I am not sure about that also. But the f1 and the C-h bindings
point to the same keymaps AFAIK.

I think it is important to make the help easy accessible.

E.g.:
M-x find-dired <RET> gives:
Run find in directory: ~/
Hitting f1 (with my patch) gives:
  Help for find-dired:
  Run `find' and go into Dired mode on a buffer of the output.
  The command run (after changing into DIR) is
  
      find . \( ARGS \) -ls
  
  except that the variable `find-ls-option' specifies what to use
  as the final argument.

> How about having the completion-help display code[*] do it:
> when showing completions, if there's only a single unique completion,
> show instead the help buffer.
>
> That way, you could either hit `?' after typing the command, or e.g. hit
> TAB a few times -- once to complete the command, and another time to
> display help.
>
I don't think, one can use '?' for the example above.
Or do I miss something here?

> [*] Probably not the generic completion-help code, but some specialized
>     version used when completing functions/commands -- though perhaps
>     the option of doing something special for completion-help-with-only-
>     one-completion could be made a general feature for users of completion.
>
> F1 currently does normal help without a prompt in the minibuffer, which
> is a bit awkward; maybe it should just do the same thing as `?' in the
> minibuffer -- which combined with the above technique, would actually
> make it work the same as your suggestion... :-]

It would be nice to have a functionality like the one I suggested to
be built into emacs.

Stefan.