If you follow Charles Choi’s work, you’ll know that, unlike some of us, he’s not afraid of menus and uses then frequently. His latest hack is to take a look at—and reimagine—the Emacs Help menu. You can read his post for all the details but the thing I really like is popping up help in a new frame. The result is that you can keep the help around for as long as you need it without feeling the need to reclaim the screen real estate.
You can do that with buffers in a single frame, of course, but putting it in an separate frame makes it seem more disjoint from your working environment: it’s right there if you need it but it’s not cluttering up your working buffers.
Choi implements this with three new commands:
- Open an Info buffer in a new frame
- Open a new Info instance in a new frame
- Open a Man page in a new frame
This seems particularly nice if you have enough screen real estate to keep the new frames visible. All the information is there to consult without disturbing your working buffers. It’s a nice way of removing a bit of friction from your workflow.
We here at Irreal prefer not to use menus—although we have been known to under duress—but I really like the idea of invoking separate frames for help. Choi gives the code for his changes so it would probably be trivial to bind the functions to a key shortcut instead of—or in addition to—a menu. Take a look at Choi’s post and see what you think.