Over at the Emacs subreddit, WarmToiletSeat0 posts an all-too-rare thank you for a part of Emacs that we all take for granted: documentation. Emacs is famously the self-documenting editor, of course, but most of us probably don’t think very deeply about what that means or how it happens.
When I hear that term, I usually think about docstrings. They make it possible to add easily accessed documentation to even your private Emacs code. Done well, as they most often are, a docstring tells you everything you need to know about a function. Like every other Emacs user, I call them up all the time through the help system.
But docstrings are just the beginning. Like every other big project, Emacs has one or more comprehensive manuals that document the system and how to use it. In the case of Emacs, those manuals are available in printed form, online, and—most importantly—as Info files accessible from Emacs itself. That means that an Emacs user can call up the Emacs manual or any of the auxiliary manuals from within Emacs and have the (hypertext) results displayed in an Emacs buffer.
That last phrase is, I think, important. When you call up Emacs documentation, it doesn’t fire up a PDF reader or shunt you off to some other application to read it. The results are right there in an Emacs buffer just like any other.
The point of WarmToiletSeat0’s post is to say thank you to the folks who provide that documentation. Sometimes it’s a developer but other times it’s just someone who steps up to perform a necessary and important function. I’d like to add my thanks to those unsung heroes who do the unglamorous work of documenting our editor and making it better for us all.