Question

I’m looking for a non-interactive function which will take a name, and display its documentation in a new window, honoring the ‘links’ quoted in the docstring.

All I could find is:

• apropos, which needs an interactive, intermediate step, and
• documentation, which returns plain strings, ignoring the mentioned ‘links’.

Is there a function that brings the best of both worlds? If not, how to compose it (i.e. generate links from words quoted `like this’)?

Answer 1

The help functions can be called non-interactively too:

(describe-function 'forward-char)

This displays the documentation in a new window (the variable help-window-select controls where it is displayed).

If you want a function which works both for functions and variables then this is a possible approach:

(defun my-describe-stuff (symbol)
  (if (functionp symbol)
      (describe-function symbol)
    (if (boundp symbol)
        (describe-variable symbol))))