[db48x]

Agreed. So many of the people who ask questions on the Emacs stackexchange have never even looked at the manual. Emacs has excellent documentation, and often there will be a whole chapter dedicated to answering that specific question. The title of the chapter will have the same key words as their question. And the manual is readable right inside Emacs!

But by asking the question on SE, they can get someone else to go to the trouble of doing a keyword search on the table of contents to find the relevant chapter, then paste in the first paragraph of that chapter.

It's laziness, pure and simple.

[vivekd]

You know when I get stuck I go to stack overflow and inevitably I see someone responding to a question with a link to the docs that is often unhelpful.

If you don't know an answer offhand and haven't worked with the specific part of the program the question is about then there might be an issue with implementing the docs you are unaware of.

Assuming the asker is lazy, didn't read the docs and just linking the docs isn't actually helpful behavior. Please do not do this.

[egberts1]

Excellent documentation? For Emacs?

There is such a thing as overloaded and non-user-centric documentation that is rich in details (if you already knew a few Emacs-type keywords)

[db48x]

The Emacs documentation really is quite good. It is user–centric, as you say, starting by naming the things the user can see and interact with when they run Emacs (the menu bar, the tool bar, etc, etc) before going on to more complex topics, such as how commands are given via the keyboard or mouse.

While it is detailed, it can hardly be called overloaded. The real reference material is in a completely different book, the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual. There is also a FAQ, and if you’ve never programmed in Lisp before then there is the Emacs Lisp Intro. Then there are something like 60 other manuals for various packages that come with Emacs, like Org Mode or the calculator. These all serve to keep the core manual from becoming overloaded with details.

You can read them all online at <https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/>, should you care to try to prove me wrong.

I estimate that about 30% of questions on the Emacs StackExchange can be answered by quoting from that core manual, another 20% by the FAQ, 20% by the Elisp Intro, the Reference, or the docstrings of individual commands, and another 10% by the manual for Org Mode. The calculator comes up occasionally too. Perhaps 10–20% of the questions on the site are actually interesting questions that require real thought or a look at the source code.