Subject: bug#38601: describe-mode never says the most important thing

From: Phil Sainty <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Dec 2019 15:09:09 +1300

On 14/12/19 12:29 PM, 積丹尼 Dan Jacobson wrote:
> P.S., some of the entries are followed by a mysterious
> (fn &optional ARG)
> and some of them aren't.

It appears that this bug has been fixed for Emacs 27.

> each section between the ^L's could go on for miles and miles, never
> revealing the most important thing: how to turn it on and off.

Surely the most important thing is telling you what each mode does.

Knowing how to turn them off is important, but once you know how to
turn one minor mode on or off, then you know how to turn *any* minor
mode on or off -- it's the same in all cases.

(I do think there's an argument for showing the mode symbol rather
than a capitalised variant of the name in the `describe-mode' help;
but that's a different conversation.)

> Well OK, at the top say "to avoid cluttering the page, please click
> each item to learn how to turn it on and off". (Or "how to invoke.")

But even if you follow the link, it still won't tell you how to
*interactively* enable or disable the mode (e.g. with M-x MODENAME);
so if a person is so new to Emacs that they don't already know how to
do all these things, I'm not sure that your suggestion is sufficient
to resolve that situation.  And once they do have that very basic
understanding of modes, the information is pretty redundant.

I don't think I'd be bothered by the information being added, but I'm
not sure that its absence is really a significant problem?  I suspect
you'll need more people to add their agreement to the bug report to
convince people otherwise.

-Phil