Magit help popup enabled by default

Question

Every time I open Magit status buffer I need to press ?. How can I make it so it opens automatically?

doing this didn't help

(add-hook 'magit-mode 'magit-dispatch-popup)  

Answer 1

There's no hook variable named magit-mode. You were looking for magit-mode-hook (mode hooks are always named MODENAME-hook). That's not the solution here, though.

I can only imagine this very quickly going from "I have to press ? every time to get the help" to "I have to press q every time to dismiss the help", however you can do what you've asked for by defining some after-advice for magit-status:

(defadvice magit-status (after my-magit-status-dispatch-popup)
  (magit-dispatch-popup))
(ad-activate 'magit-status)

n.b. That won't trigger for anything other than calling magit-status, so refreshing the status buffer (which calls magit-refresh) won't do it (which I think is a good thing).

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Edit: In more recent versions of Magit the above code causes a byte-compilation warning (see comments), but you could use the following variation instead:

(defadvice magit-status (after my-magit-status-dispatch)
  (call-interactively 'magit-dispatch))
(ad-activate 'magit-status)