Clamps Overview

The Emacs editor can appear quite strange and intimidating, especially for novice users. For anyone not comfortable with Emacs, studying the Emacs Tutorial, available under the Emacs Help Menu is strongly recommended and well worth the time spent.

Being in a Lisp Mode buffer or the REPL, the documentation of all symbols and special forms of the Common Lisp Language Standard can be accessed using the key combination <C-c C-d h>. Pressing these keys with the cursor positioned directly after the expression will open a browser window with a page of the Common Lisp HyperSpec showing the documentation of the symbol. A local copy of the HyperSpec gets automatically installed with the installation of Clamps using the clamps-install repository.

Cltl2 is the language standard of Common Lisp, finalized in 1990. The Common Lisp HyperSpec has been derived from the online documentation of Cltl2. Although many users prefer the HyperSpec, sometimes it might be desirable to study the original, commented standard.

To that end the key combination <C-c C-d l> will lookup a symbol in a local copy of Cltl2, like the HyperSpec downloaded by the clamps installation and stored in $HOME​/​.config/common-lisp/cltl2.

Online documentation of symbols of Common Music or Clamps can be accessed by pressing the key combination <C-c C-d c>. Depending on the symbol this will open a local page of the Common Music Dictionary or Clamps Dictionary, which is integrated in the browser-based clamps documentatiion.

Incudine has different formats to get help. It is available in the Internet at the Incudine Home Page. Local documentation can be generated in different formats, like texinfo, html or any output format supported by Texinfo depending on the user's preferences. As Emacs has a builtin info-mode for dealing with Texinfo files this can be a viable online help option for adept Emacs users.