Earlier this week I wrote about Bozhidar Batsov’s post on short Emacs configuration hacks. As I mentioned then, my favorite was a simple configuration variable that causes the Help buffer to get focus when you open it.
It’s easy to take the position of “who cares” but, as I said, I almost always want to interact with the Help buffer if only to dismiss it. Often though, I also want to scroll the buffer—yes I know about scroll-other-window and its siblings—or follow one of the links in the buffer.
After I wrote that post, one of the first things I did was enable the option to give the Help buffer focus. I can’t tell you how much I love the change. It turns out I use the help command more than I thought I did and every time I wanted the focus to be in that buffer. Not once since I made the change have I wished the focus remained in the original buffer.
It’s pretty easy to imagine a case where it would be more convenient to have the original buffer retain focus but in those cases one can simply change windows back to it. One thing for sure, I’ll be doing that a lot less than staying in the Help buffer and dismissing it when I’m done.
You really should try it out. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. As I said, it’s simply a matter of setting help-window-select to t so you can try it out in your current session without involving your init.el.