For reading programming (and other) documentation, the Emacs INFO mode is outstanding. So outstanding that I would like to be able to read say, the Emacs Lisp info file and the org-mode info files simultaneously without traversing back up to the beginning of the info tree. Either I've missed something obvious or I will need to hack some Emacs Lisp to achieve the goal. And yet again, someone may have already cracked this nut. So I guess my question is: what is the state of the practice for reading mulitple INFO files in Emacs simultaneously?
If you look at the documentation for the 'info
command (bound to C-h i by default), you'll find that you can easily create new *info*
buffers with a numeric prefix.
C-u 1 C-h i
C-u 42 C-h i
That creates info buffers named *info*<1>
and *info*<42>
.
Documentation for the 'info
command is (emphasis mine):
Enter Info, the documentation browser. Optional argument file-or-node specifies the file to examine; the default is the top-level directory of Info. Called from a program, file-or-node may specify an Info node of the form `(FILENAME)NODENAME'. Optional argument buffer specifies the Info buffer name; the default buffer name is info. If buffer exists, just switch to buffer. Otherwise, create a new buffer with the top-level Info directory.
In interactive use, a non-numeric prefix argument directs this command to read a file name from the minibuffer. A numeric prefix argument selects an Info buffer with the prefix number appended to the Info buffer name.
Also, by default, in the *info*
buffer, M-n is bound to 'clone-buffer
, which will create a new *info*
buffer looking at the same page.