Emacs has self-documentation as one of its goals, and it achieves this pretty well for Emacs Lisp with commands like describe-variable
, describe-function
, etc. Packages like company-quickhelp make this even more convenient by providing help in tooltips, which reduces the need to constantly switch attention to a Help buffer.
The built-in Info reader is also very convenient for browsing Info manuals. Helm
improves upon this by providing helm-info, which allows for choosing from all installed Info files and searching a file's index via incremental completion.
I find the above tools important because, by making documentation look-up easier, they encourage me to do more of it.
However, it's difficult to replicate the ease with which I can look up documentation about Emacs, Emacs Lisp, etc. with other tools and languages. For example, if I forget what a CSS rule does, I still find myself Googling for answers, which is slow and shifts attention away from Emacs.
So, what are some good ways (both general and specific to particular tools/languages) to look-up documentation or check manuals in Emacs?
Common Lisp, for example, has SLIME, which tries to do for Common Lisp what Emacs does for Emacs Lisp, although it doesn't get as far because many references are made to the Common Lisp HyperSpec.
occur
you could even make an ad hoc interactive table of contents.