As most of you know, Irreal doesn’t think much of editor-connected bling. We much prefer simple efficiency to flashy accouterments that, in the end, simply get in the way of a decent editing experience. That’s true even though they can, arguably, make it easier to get started with a new editor.
It feels a little odd, then, to be writing favorably about these reformatted Emacs documents that, while they have the same content as the official documents, have been reformatted to look a bit nicer and, more importantly, be easier to navigate. It’s probably not accurate to describes the results as “bling” especially since the point of the change is better navigation.
The two major changes are a sidebar that essentially recapitulates the table of contents so that it’s easy to get an overall view of the document and an improved search function that makes parsing the search results easier.
Irreal does think that these documents are a worthwhile addition to the Emacs document stack and wouldn’t object if, arguendo, they were adopted by GNU. Still, the Irreal bunker is probably going to continue to use the “official” documents but doesn’t object if others make a different choice.
The documents that are available are:
- The GNU Emacs Manual
- The GNU Elisp Reference Manual
- The Org Manual
- The AUCTeX Manual
- The Magit Manual
Take a look at one or more of them and see what you think.