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bug#46627: [PATCH] Add new help command 'describe-command'


From: Dmitry Gutov
Subject: bug#46627: [PATCH] Add new help command 'describe-command'
Date: Sat, 27 Feb 2021 22:38:31 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.10.0

On 22.02.2021 17:18, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
Cc: stefan@marxist.se, larsi@gnus.org, rms@gnu.org, 46627@debbugs.gnu.org
From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2021 01:46:50 +0200

Saying "Emacs has these functions for doc discovery" is totally fine,
but I don't think we can stop there and ignore the current practice
among our users, or the experience from other editing environments.

We are not ignoring the current practices.  We are saying that people
who want their discovery based on completion will find the solution in
the completion alternatives we have already in Emacs, and if that
still doesn't fit the bill, in the 3rd-party packages out there.

Do you have in mind some particular "completion alternative we have already" for 'describe-command'?

I
think Emacs provides, and will continue providing, ample
infrastructure for such extensions, and that's enough, IMO.  There's
no reason we should feel obliged to develop these features in Emacs.
We will never be able to satisfy everyone there anyway.

I believe the argument is that we can improve the default experience by enacting some minor changes which correspond to what we know about how users discover new commands (or functions) or remember existing ones. And do that without pulling in major new functionality or features from third-party packages (which goes against the "lean core" concept which you probably know I prefer).

And I believe we shouldn't discount initiatives to improve the default experience's usability as attempts to "satisfy everyone". Which I also think we shouldn't do.

There were also suggestions for admittedly more invasive changes (like doing a bunch of renames in the standard library) which seem to have all been rejected by the leadership. I understand the reluctance to change things, but the argument about Emacs's extensibility and the 3rd party ecosystem wouldn't apply to it either because no matter how convenient and slick an external package might make completion experience, if the functions are irregularly named, that will remain a problem anyway.

So you might disagree on whether this feature is important. But I hope you can see how some aspects of the "whole new discovery framework" (which I'm saying isn't new) cannot be effectively enacted by 3rd party code without help from us here.





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