Open File and Directory: What's the Emacs command?

Question

I would like to set custom keyboard shortcuts for the Open File and Open Directory commands listed in the File menu. The only problem is that I don't know the corresponding Lisp commands. I've tried open-file but it doesn't work. I've tried Googling for the answer, but it too failed.

Answer 1

Emacs is designed to be self-documenting. A comment has already shown you how to use C-h k to get help for a keyboard shortcut (or a menu shortcut in this case). There are other quite a lot of other help commands available. You can get a list of them by typing C-h ?. It's a pretty long list, but I'll describe two that you'll especially want to remember (in addition to C-h k).

C-h f gives you help for a function, if you know that function's name. Obviously not directly helpful in your case, since you didn't yet know the name.

C-h a searches for commands by name, but you don't have to know the exact name. For example, you could have typed in "file" at the resulting prompt and it would give you a list of all commands with the word "file" in the name. Unfortunately for you that's a pretty long list. Clicking on anything in this list (or putting the cursor on it and hitting enter) takes you to the same help that C-h f gives you.

C-h i opens up the Info viewer. This is a great choice when you get lost, because Emacs comes with a bunch of different manuals which you can read here. You start out at an index listing all the available manuals. Go down to the Emacs manual and click or hit enter to view it. There's a huge amount of stuff in here, but it's pretty well organized. In your case I would scan down the table of contents until I saw an entry labeled "Files" under the heading "Major Structures of Emacs". That link takes us to chapter 18. The second paragraph explains that opening a file is usually called "visiting" the file, though it doesn't get into the historical reasons for that. There's another table of contents for the chapter there, and the second entry is labeled "Visiting", so that's the obvious next step. That gives us a nice list of different commands for visiting files (yes, there's more than one) as well as a bunch of prose that describes things in some detail. There's nothing much there about directories, but that's documented a little further along in section 18.8.

C-h m shows help information about all the various modes which are active in the current buffer. Usually that's a major mode which is determined by the file type, plus some number of minor modes that add features that are available for many types of files. Not of any direct use for you, since it won't show you the find-file command you were looking for, but you'll consult this information fairly frequently. You might take a look while you're reading the manuals to see the handy keyboard shortcuts for navigating up and down the tree structure of the manuals.

C-h b shows you a listing of every single keybinding currently configured in the current buffer. This is never going to be a small list, but it's handy because it's generated from the actual keymaps that are currently in place. This means that nothing is ever left out; while other sources are hand-written and might ommit details for clarity, this always includes everything.