Charlie Holland has a followup to his post on Emacs Help that I wrote about the other day. It’s a reconsidered, condensed version of the original post. As Holland puts it,
This is a condensed version of my very long June Emacs Carnival post on the same topic. I wanted to make this as I felt it would be more intuitive for beginners, who are most likely to benefit from learning Emacs’s auto-discovery features.
It actually is more useful both for n00bs and experienced users alike. The best example of that is his explicit calling out of what he calls “the prefix trick”. The idea is that there are a handful of prefixes that begin many help commands. One example is describe- that begins all the help commands that describe something: describe-function, describe-variable, etc. The “trick” is that you can type Meta+x describe and then Tab to get a list of all the describe commands. That’s something that most of us know implicitly but it’s useful to have it pointed out explicitly.
The other useful fact, which I wasn’t aware of, is that Meta+x which-key-show-top-level will show all the commands without a prefix.
The point of Holland’s followup is that you don’t need to memorize a lot of arcana to use the Emacs Help system. If you know the prefixes to use with Meta+x and Ctrl+h Ctrl+h to bring up the Help cheat sheet, you’re good to go.