Re: Ideas to improve the output of C-h m?

[Stefan Kangas]

Clément Pit-Claudel <address@hidden> writes:

> That's fair, though with a bit of luck that was partly due to the text-only 
> output.  WDYT of the attached screenshot? (of course the issue remains to 
> some extent, but hopefully the font size, face, and spacing changes help?)
> (I also removed the parentheses and the quotes, and re-added the vertical 
> alignment)

Thank you for working on this.  I like the look of the screenshot, but
you didn't include a patch.  If you could provide one, I may be able
to give you more useful feedback on the basis of testing it.

One related idea comes to mind:

Some modes, e.g. Info-mode, currently implement their own doc string
and never bother with 'substitute-command-keys'
("\\{<foo>-mode-map}").[1]  One important motivation for doing that is
to group commands by category, something which AFAICT is not possible
with s-c-k.  (My impression is also that it sometimes is done
specifically to exclude certain key bindings from a listing, likely
because they are not perceived as integral to the functioning of the
mode.)

It would be useful, I think, if the mode author was able to customize
the listing of commands while also "automatically" using the best
standard for displaying them (with the added faces, indentation, etc.
as you suggest) rather than having to write a doc string manually to
achieve it.  For example, maybe we could come up with a way to group
commands by categories and then have them displayed under proper
headlines in key binding listings.

If you find the idea interesting, perhaps it could be a further
development of what you're proposing here.

Best regards,
Stefan Kangas

Footnotes:
1. As an aside, I have started converting 'substite-command-keys' from
C to Lisp some time ago, but I got stuck somewhere and didn't complete
it.  I hope I can find the energy and time to finish that job.