Just the other day when I was writing the post about Steve Purcell’s rewrite of whole-line-or-region, I wanted to ensure that I had the latest version of whole-line-or-region to make sure there weren’t any gotchas after an upgrade. I did that by going to ~/.emacs.d/elpa and checking the version number in the source file. That’s an annoyingly fussy way of doing something so basic.
Serendipitously, Bozhidar Batsov over at Emacs Redux, has a post on Describe Package that reminded me of the correct way of doing these things. I’m sure I knew this already but it had completely slipped my mind. There’s really no excuse because it has the simple binding Ctrl+h P.
If you’re using something like Ivy, you’ll get a nice list of fuzzy matches for the package to help you narrow down to the one you want. The problem, of course, is that it’s not something you use often enough to remember but it’s worth the effort. It makes it so easy to find out almost everything you want to know about a package without having to lookup and go through the source files.
Be sure to take a look at Batsov’s post if you aren’t already completely familiar with describe-package. You might not need it often but when you do it’s just what you need.