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I'm looking for a way to visualize inside Emacs the Full Description of a package as shown in Elpa index page.

For example the undo-tree package has a nice and comprehensive help page/description embedded in its source code which is fully shown in its Elpa page but the only way I found to see it inside Emacs is opening its source code.

There's some way to see this full description inside Emacs?

What I know so far:

  • It turns out that the section visualized in Elpa Full Description is named Commentary: , right below the Copyright section, both inside the source code's preamble. So one way to solve this question is by looking for the tools that can extract the source code's preamble and print the commentary section.
Alexandro de Oliveira
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2 Answers2

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M-x finder-commentary RET <library-name> RET extracts that section and presents it in a separate buffer for reading. There is also M-x finder-by-keyword for discovering libraries this way.

wasamasa
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  • This function is defined inside the library "finder.el" whose author is none other than Eric S. Raymond, the famous hacker and author of the book "The Cathedral and Bazaar". It's very exciting to know that today we can use tools developed by legends like him and Richard Stallman. Thank you @wasamasa – Alexandro de Oliveira May 29 '17 at 19:47
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I'm looking for a way to visualize inside Emacs the Full Description of a package as shown in Elpa index page.

You're looking for describe-package.

npostavs
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