Emacs Docs

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Questions (if ever asked) And Answers ​

What is this site? ​

This website currently consists of three parts:

  • Emacs *info* manuals, either built-in or for selected (M)ELPA packages

    A full list of currently available manuals can be found in the manuals page.

  • Emacs docstring from multiple Emacs versions, formatted with helpful-mode

    See helpful.html

  • Emacs gallery collection, wiht previews of most themes from (M)ELPA

    See gallery.html.

Why? ​

This project is inspired by Emacs Docs by Thomas F. K. Jorna, and Emacs Online Documentation by Artur Malabarba. And they've explained the reasons quite well:

  • The manuals on the GNU website are not that enjoyable to read, and adding a sidebar, table of contents, and a search box might help a bit.

  • We want to be able to link to Emacs docstrings from our blogs, online documents, and forum posts, and, if you don't have Emacs on Android installed yet, to explore Emacs documentation from mobile.

As for the gallery, it's helpful, ... right?

Why doesn't it include (this package)? ​

Well, it hasn't been added yet, but you can request it by opening an issue on Codeberg, or better yet, submit a PR for that.

Why doesn't it include (this theme)? ​

For themes though, a theme package on (M)ELPA is automatically included if either:

  • its package name contains theme,
  • or its keyword list contains theme or themes.

I do maintain a blocklist of themes (mostly likely because they break the build process). If you think a theme should be included, please request it.

There's something wrong! ​

Whoops! The manual pages are converted from .texi files to .html and .xml then to Markdown files, and things can go wrong in all kinds of ways; the docstring pages are htmlize-ed from Emacs buffers, and things can also go unexpected; the gallery installs and loads and runs all kinds of theme packages, and things also can go wrong in all kinds of ways... But, anyways, you're welcome to report it!

Do you have any other fantastic projects? ​

This question is from the original emacsdocs.org, so let's quote the original answer first:

Why yes! I maintain org-roam-ui, a way to interact with your org-roam Zettelkasten more visually.

-- Thomas F. K. Jorna - Author of Emacs Docs

For me though, I have some other projects, but the only Emacs relevant one might be Juicemacs, a work-in-(stale)-progress Emacs clone with experimental JIT compiler for Lisp. [1]

  1. If you're interested, I talked about it at EmacsConf 2025: Juicemacs: Exploring Speculative JIT Compilation for ELisp in Java. ↩︎