cxh@Franz.COM (Chris Hylands) (05/09/91)
Manual pages for Allegro Common Lisp on the Next are now available via
ftp. about 367K compressed. Our manual page system uses GNU emacs as
an interface to the manual pages.
The manual pages are available on:
ucbvax.berkeley.edu pub/franzinc/cl-manual.tar
(Note that there is an older version, clman.tar.Z, on nova.cc.purdue.edu
and other places. I have submitted the new version to purdue.)
Here is the README file that is included in the manual page tar file.
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-[Wed May 1 14:55:21 1991 by cxh]-
README file for Allegro Common Lisp online manual
All files are Copyright 1988-1991 by Franz Inc. Users may copy these
files to computers for their own use. These files may not be
distributed in printed form without the express prior written approval
of Franz Inc. These files may not be included as part of any other
software package without the express prior written approval of Franz
Inc. All other rights reserved.
Files whose type is `el' may be distributed with GNU Emacs under the
terms of the GNU Emacs license agreement. Files without the extension
`el' are NOT covered by the GNU Emacs License agreement and use is
restricted according to the copyright notice above.
The information in these files are based on the Allegro CL User Guide.
NOTE: they are based on the 3.0 distribution of Allegro CL and some
pages may be incomplete or incorrect for the current 3.1 distribution.
The Allegro CL User Guide is the official documentation for Allegro
CL. It may be purchased from Franz Inc. Please contact Franz Inc.
(info@franz.com) for more information.
Introduction
The Franz Inc. Common Lisp online manual provides manual pages for
Allegro Common Lisp extensions on the NeXT cube. The Common Lisp
online manual uses GNU Emacs to access the manual pages.
Installation
The online manual directory should be located in a directory in the
emacs load-path. The standard place to put the online manual
directory is in the lisp/ directory under your emacs distribution. If
you are using the Franz Inc. Emacs-Lisp interface, there should
already be a lisp/fi/ directory.
To install the online manual directory in the lisp/fi/, simply untar
the online manual tar file in the /usr/lib/emacs/lisp directory.
cd /usr/lib/emacs/lisp
tar -xf clman.tar
If you are not using the Franz Inc. Emacs-Lisp interface, you may
simply move the online manual directory to the lisp/ directory.
If you are using the Franz Inc. Emacs-Lisp interface, the
online manual will be available to you the next time you start up emacs.
If you are not using the online manual, add these lines to your .emacs
file:
(autoload 'fi:clman "fi/clman" nil t)
(autoload 'fi:clman-mode "fi/clman" nil t)
(autoload 'fi:clman-apropos "fi/clman" nil t)
Using the Online Manual
The online manual is automatically loaded with the rest of the
interface. The two entry points to the online manual are the
functions fi:clman and fi:clman-apropos. fi:clman is used to look up
a symbol in the online manual. fi:clman-apropos is used to do an
apropos search on a string.
The features of this package include:
* Command completion: begin typing in a symbol and hit the completion
key. Note: You cannot use command completion when you precede a symbol
with a package qualifier, but see the item below.
* Package-specific search. To confine the search to a particular
package, type the nickname of the package to the prompt and hit the
carriage return. You can then type the name of a symbol in this package
or use command completion to see a list of all the symbols in the
package. The following is the complete list of package nicknames.
(One of the nicknames, "about", while not properly the name
of a package, refers to a group of broad conceptual entries such as
"about-reading" and "about-process-locks".) :
about
compiler
excl
foreign
mp
objc
sys
tpl
* Default Lookup: the program assumes you want to lookup the
symbol that surrounds, or is immediately to the left of,
your cursor. Thus you can easily look up a function in
the midst of using it in your code, or quickly pick a symbol
to lookup in the See Also section of the manual page.
* All instances of a symbol in a particular package are found.
Symbols of the same name may have more than one manual pages.
For example, function is a type specifier, a special form and a
declaration specifier. fi:clman prints the number of additional
manual pages in the minibuffer. Use fi:clman-next-entry to go to
the next documented entry for a particular symbol. (To narrow
the search for a symbol down to a particular package, use
fi:clman-apropos.)
Known limitations:
* Note that manual pages for standard Common Lisp functions are
not included in this distribution.
* The Default Lookup mechanism doesn't understand symbols whose
names are broken over a line (e.g. make- window-stream).
Symbols in the See Also section are often broken in that way and
the Default Lookup will not work in those cases.
* There are still some rare cases when the Default Lookup routine
generates an emacs error (usually at the very beginning of a
file). If this happens, just move the cursor to a different
place and try again.
Bindings
The key bindings for CLMAN mode are set up only once, the first
time the mode is entered, and are taken from the variable
`clman:mode-map'. Users wanting to change the bindings could
explicitly set this variable or augment the map from within the hooks
for the mode.
fi:clman-mode.......................................................[function]
Major mode for viewing Allegro manual pages. text-mode-syntax-table and
text-mode-abbrev-table are `used' in this mode.
fi:clman-mode-map.....................................................[keymap]
*Major mode key definitions for viewing a clman page.
n fi:clman-next-entry
s fi:clman-search-forward-see-alsos
p fi:clman-package-help
m fi:clman
a fi:clman-apropos
C-c Prefix Command
C-c C-c fi:clman-flush-doc
Variables
fi:clman-displaying-function........................................[variable]
Value: fi:clman-find-file
*This function will be funcalled with two arguments, the .doc file to be
displayed, and the buffer which is the value of fi:clman-displaying-buffer.
If you wish, you can set this variable to your own displaying function.
fi:clman-displaying-buffer..........................................[variable]
Value: "*CLMan*"
*Either nil or a string naming the buffer that the system will use for
displaying documentation pages. If nil, then the system will not try to
reuse the same buffer.
Functions
fi:clman............................................................[function]
Invoke with: m in CLMAN mode.
Look up SYMBOL in the online manual, with completion. The optional
argument SYMBOL is prompted for in the minibuffer, if not supplied. As a
guess, the system uses the symbol immediately to the left of the text
cursor. To get completion for a symbol in a package other than the :lisp
package, use the nickname of that package, followed by a colon (e.g. objc: or
compiler:). The buffer that is displayed will be in CLMAN mode.
fi:clman-apropos....................................................[function]
Invoke with: a in CLMAN mode.
Prompts for a string on which an apropos search is done. Displays a
buffer which lists all documented symbols which match the string. The
buffer will be in CLMAN mode.
fi:clman-search-forward-see-alsos...................................[function]
Invoke with: s in CLMAN mode.
Move text cursor directly to the beginning of the SEE ALSO section of a
clman buffer, from anywhere in the buffer.
fi:clman-flush-doc..................................................[function]
Invoke with: C-c C-c in CLMAN mode.
Flush the current clman buffer.
--
Chris Hylands, Franz Inc. 1995 University Avenue, Suite 275
cxh@Franz.COM Berkeley, CA 94704
uunet!franz!cxh Phone: (415) 548-3600; FAX: (415) 548-8253