There is a dearth of information at your fingertips, the problem is
trying to find what you are looking for quickly. If you have never
used Emacs before, then you should
probably spend a few minutes using the online tutorial. This can be
invoked with F1 t. If you keep pressing C-h or
F1, you will get a menu of frequently used help options; the
most useful of these are described in this subsection.
Usually, though, you wish to find out what will happen when you press
a particular key, or which key will execute the function you want. To
do the former, use
F1 k or in Epoch HELP which executes
describe-key
and then press the key or key combination you are interested in. A
*Help* buffer will be displayed showing the name of the
function and short description of what it does. To get rid of
the *Help* buffer, you can use F9 if you previously had
just one window, or F10 or M-F10 otherwise. To find out
which function will do the operation you have in mind, use
F1 a KEYWORD RET
where KEYWORD is one of char, line, word, sentence, paragraph, region, page, list, defun, buffer, screen, window, file, dir, register, mode, beginning, end, forward, backward, next, previous, up, down, search, goto, kill, delete, mark, insert, yank, fill, indent, case, change, set, what, find, view, describe. You can use other keywords, too, but these are the most useful, since most interactive Emacs commands contain one of them. For each interactive command whose name contains the keyword, a short description of what it does will be displayed along with the key sequence which will invoke it. To find out more about one of these functions, or any function whose name you know, use
F1 f FUNCTION RET
and the full description of FUNCTION will be shown. To get a description of the current major mode, use
F1 m which executes describe-mode
This will display brief information about ``buffer
specific'' commands, key bindings and variables. This is helpful the
first time you use a major mode (like LaTeX) that is not
familiar to you. If you have used the mode a few times but just want
a list of commands and the keys to which they are bound, use
F1 S which executes make-command-summary