Emacs help key

Introduction

Traditionally in emacs, the backspace key (control-H) is bound to the help function. Pressing this key, followed by a character will get you help on various things. If you've never used help, press backspace three times to get a complete listing of what keys do what. If you've used it but can't remember the list of characters, press backspace twice, and you'll get the characters along the bottom of the screen.

Changing the Help Key

Frequently people want to use the backspace key as a backspace key in emacs, not a help key. Here in the CIS department, the version of emacs we use makes this easy. If you have an up to date .emacs file, it should contain the following:

(setq HP-help-key 8) Where 8 represents control-H. Just change this number to some other ascii value, and things should work automatically. For instance, changing this number to a 30 will set the help key to ascii character 30, which is control-caret (control-shift-6, usually).

Last Update: 1/7/94 JGW

Original author: TAF