I just discovered the following blog article by Bill Clementson, from way back in 2003. Luckily, the links still worked, so I was able to get Info pages today for the Common Lisp HyperSpec courtesy of the GCL project.
Once installed, I found I could not easily lookup documentation for, say, mapcar, because it’s actually on the page for mapc. But SLIME’s hyperspec.el contained the indexing info I needed to write a new module which fires up the Info system on the correct section for the symbol you want defined.
This new module is called cl-info.el and is available from my Lisp repository. It rebinds the standard Emacs key for function help (C-h f) to lookup help in the HyperSpec instead, if you’re in a lisp-mode buffer.
NOTE: A fellow Lisper pointed me to this blog entry which offers a much nicer way to get the HyperSpec in Info form. It’s a little more work, but the quality of the result is superior and it has an index! Also, it makes my cl-info.el unnecessary, by relying entirely on the Info system itself.
Hi John! Great to see your name appear on Planet Lisp :-)
Hey, Luke! We were just talking about you on #lisp today, wondering where you were living now. Stop by and say hi sometime (assuming I don’t know already your nick; perhaps we’ve been chatting already and I didn’t know!).
Hi John,
where can I download your cl-info.el? the link on your blog is out of date.
Thank you!!
It’s here:
ftp://ftp.newartisans.com/pub/emacs/cl-info.el
I’ll update the blog entry now.
Many many thanks!!
There is still a problem. /pub/emacs/cl-info.el is a symbol link to `/pub/lisp/cl-info.el’. but it seems that cl-info.el isn’t there.
Sorry about that, I forgot to ls -l. Try now.