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.

Tags: Common Lisp