Emacs Lisp Function Guide?

Question

I have been using Emacs for more than three years now but it still takes me days to write even small functions in Lisp. I\'ve looked through GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual but

Answer 1

In XEmacs, and I believe in Emacs as well, pressing C-h f, then the tab key for tab completion, which at that point is all functions, will give you a list of functions the editor knows about.

You just use cursor keys and scroll to one you want to know about and press enter to see details.

If a list of functions, with further info available, is what you want, that will give it to you.

This list is all currently available functions, so if you have packages of lisp installed, it shows the functions those packages supply as well as native functions. In my copy of XEmacs, today, I have 6,586 functions in the list. Emacs will be similar.

The problem is that not all functions have names that make them context-meaningful (ie not all menu variables/functions have the word menu in them, so you will miss some things if you go by names only.

You can use the INFO pages (on the menu) to view them more topically arranged, and get to the same usage information.