CL Hyperspec in Info format in Emacs
Thursday, October 2, 2003
I always felt that it was neat to have context-sensitive access to the Common Lisp HyperSpec when working with CL code in Emacs using ILISP. However, it bugged me a bit that I had to call IE from Emacs in order to display the documentation. I got around this by using the Emacs-based W3 browser but soon went back to using IE because W3 is so slow. Now, I've discovered an info version of the CL documentation and usually use that instead of the browser-based versions. I've put full installation and setup instructions on my Common Lisp Cookbook - Setting up an IDE with Emacs on Windows or Mac OS X page. I use the following code (included in the .emacs file at the above page) to provide context-sensitive help off of the "C-M-F1" key binding:
(global-set-key [(control meta f1)] '(lambda () (interactive) (ignore-errors (info (concatenate 'string "(gcl) " (thing-at-point 'symbol))))))Using info from within Emacs is a lot faster than bringing up a browser.
