Over at the Emacs Elements Channel there’s another useful video up. This time it’s about the Emacs Help system. The majority of experienced Emacs users will already be familiar with most of the material but if you’re a learn-as-you-go user, there may be some information new to you.
The first thing is that Ctrl+h Ctrl+h will show you a list of all the help commands. If you’re like me, you know this but always forget it when you’re trying to remember a help command. There are a lot more commands then the ones you use everyday so it’s worth your while to type Ctrl+h Ctrl+h to see what’s available.
For example, I’d completely forgotten about Ctrl+H w to discover the shortcut for a given command. My usual procedure is to bring up the documentation for the command and get the information there but I’m going to try to remember to use Ctrl+h w instead.
Another thing that I learned from the video is the difference between scrolling up and down with Space and Delete versus the <PgUp> and <PgDn> keys. I’ll let you watch the video to see what that difference is.
The video is 14 minutes 52 seconds long so it shouldn’t be too hard to find time but you may have to plan ahead.