{"id":192,"date":"2011-08-05T14:25:00","date_gmt":"2011-08-05T18:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=192"},"modified":"2011-12-27T13:00:17","modified_gmt":"2011-12-27T18:00:17","slug":"the-emacs-info-apropos-command","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=192","title":{"rendered":"The Emacs Info Apropos Command"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I&#8217;m a longtime Unix programmer. I started before Linux or FreeBSD and if you count Xenix, I programmed on versions as early as System III. As a result, I came to view the man page as the <i>sine qua non<\/i> of Unix documentation. Later, the GNU project introduced the texinfo format but by then I was well into curmudgeonhood and I never did warm up to <code>info<\/code>. Part of the problem was <code>info<\/code> itself. As far as I&#8217;m concerned, it&#8217;s unusable. I know, I know, lots of people love <code>info<\/code>. I&#8217;m not one of those people. When I absolutely had to read an info page I used a little <code>Tcl\/Tk<\/code> utility called <code>tkinfo<\/code>. I still used it grudgingly but at least it was usable. <\/p>\n<p> Back in those days, I was a <code>vi<\/code> user, so <code>info<\/code> or <code>tkinfo<\/code> were pretty much the only choices. When I moved to Emacs, I was delighted to discover that its info interface was much better so, while I still preferred man pages, I got much more comfortable with info documentation. One problem I still had even with the Emacs info reader was that it&#8217;s hard to search for specific text if you&#8217;re not already on the proper node. Now Mickey over at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.masteringemacs.org\/\">Mastering Emacs<\/a> has written an excellent post on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.masteringemacs.org\/articles\/2011\/08\/04\/full-text-searching-info-mode-apropos\/\">Full Text Searching In Info Mode With Apropos<\/a> that showed me how to solve that problem. <\/p>\n<p> The <code>info-apropos<\/code> command (\u3010<span class=\"key\">Meta<\/span>+ <span class=\"key\">x<\/span>\u3011 <code>info-apropos<\/code>) will do a text search of all the info documentation (not just Emacs documentation) on your system. It produces an apropos-like buffer containing each match and an indication of what node it&#8217;s in. You can select one of the matches in the usual info mode way and go directly to the corresponding info node. <\/p>\n<p> Mickey&#8217;s post covers other apropos-type commands so you should definitely head over there and absorb some of his wisdom. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m a longtime Unix programmer. I started before Linux or FreeBSD and if you count Xenix, I programmed on versions as early as System III. As a result, I came to view the man page as the sine qua non &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=192\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":522,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions\/522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}