Re: Helpful in Emacs?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
> Cc: stefan@marxist.se,  me@wilfred.me.uk,  emacs-devel@gnu.org,
>   mardani29@yahoo.es
> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2021 10:00:47 +0200
> 
> What I care most for at the moment are: doc lookup for autoladed functions
> without the doc in the stub, and not yet loaded; and code inlined in help 
> buffer,
> instead of just plain link. The former would make it possible to save some
> space, for example docs does not need to be included in stubs, and can be
> fetched on demand. For example package-quickstart.el wouldn't need to pack 800
> kb of docs when some of those will never be requested anyway.

If this means asking for help on an autoloaded function will load its
package, I don't think it should be the default.  We could perhaps
arrange for a button that would load the package and display the full
documentation, but that's all.

> The latter is just plain nice to have. It saves time if I can just scroll 
> other
> (help) buffer and read the source without need ot click on link in it to fetch
> the source code.

Again, displaying the source by default is too much, IMNSHO: the code
of a function could be very large.  Doing this by default also assumes
that the user will necessarily want to look at the source, something
that is IME questionable at best.  So this should also be optional,
and even then the code should be changed to avoid showing a huge
*Help* window (since currently, we fit the window size to the text in
the *Help* buffer).