More Emacs Help

As well as keying the help provided by Google in Emacs to the major-mode, it's possible to use it with multiple libraries as well. For instance, the following snippet lets me look up documentation for one library (OGRE) by pressing 'o' and for another by pressing 'a' , rather like the Slime selector, discussed previously. It's a huseful way of pulling together doxygen API documentation when working on clonk-loads of libraries, as is all to typical of C++ or Java development.

(defun search-site-url (keyword &optional site inurl lucky)
 "Do a Google search for KEYWORD. Restrict to SITE and INURL, if specified.
Jump to best match (I Feel Lucky) if LUCKY set.
"
;;  (message (list keyword site inurl lucky))
 (concat "http://www.google.com/"
         (format "search?q=%s" (url-hexify-string keyword))
         (if site (format "+site:%s" (url-hexify-string site)))
         (if inurl (format "+inurl:%s" (url-hexify-string inurl)))
         (if lucky "&btnI")))


(defun help-selector ()
 (interactive)
 (message "Select [%s]: "
          (apply #'string (mapcar #'car help-selector-methods)))
 (let* ((ch (save-window-excursion
              (select-window (minibuffer-window))
              (read-char)))
        (params (find ch help-selector-methods :key #'car)))
   (browse-url (apply #'search-site-url (thing-at-point 'symbol) (list   (third params) (fourth params) (fifth params))))))

(defvar help-selector-methods '(( ?a "Assimp"
                                    "assimp.sourceforge.net" "/lib_html/" t)
                               ( ?o "Ogre"
                                    "www.ogre3d.org"  "/docs/api/html/" t)
                               ( ?w "WxWidgets"
                                     "docs.wxwidgets.org" "/stable/" t)))

(global-set-key [(shift f1)] 'help-selector)