Severity: minor Tags: patch The Eldoc message shows the documentation for the wrong function (or no documentation at all) in this specific situation: (a) You're typing an elisp expression into `read-from-minibuffer', and (b) the function name contains punctuation, such as ! or ?, whose character class is "punctuation" and not "symbol" in the standard syntax table. Function names as described in (b) are not only legal but quite common in third-party code. There aren't many in the standard distribution, but you'll notice a few here and there. Try this: (require 'pcvs) (call-interactively #'eval-expression) ----- Eval: (cvs-mode! ----- The mode line shows the documentation for `cvs-mode' (without the !), which is a different function and has a different lambda list. This is happening because the syntax table in the minibuffer never gets changed to the elisp table, which acknowledges all the valid symbol characters as part of the "symbol" class. There are a couple different spots in the code to which you could attribute this lapse. For one, the elisp-mode.el function `elisp--current-symbol' isn't wrapped in a `with-syntax-table', unlike other similar definitions in the same file. I think anyone invoking this function could reasonably expect it to observe elisp syntax, so that's what my tiny patch addresses. This fixes the Eldoc problem. But here's another weird thing further down the call stack. `read--expression' has a FIXME comment saying to turn on `emacs-lisp-mode' in the minibuffer -- which would also set the appropriate syntax table -- but it doesn't actually do it. I guess that must not work for whatever reason (since it has to have taken longer to write the comment than it would have taken to add the code). Should it be changed now so that it does set the major mode? Is there a problem with specialized major modes in the minibuffer? I hereby kick the can over to whoever knows more. Daniel