Emacs Doc Phrase: “Which See”

Emacs Doc String Uses the Idiotic Phrase: “Which See”

starting around Emacs 24.4 (Released 2014-10) , emacs inline doc for functions started to use the phrase “which see”. Very annoying.

There are a total of 163 lisp files containing the phrase.

this is totally useless and incomprehensible.

If user wanted to read doc of another function, he can do that already sans being told. Also, usually there is a link right before it.

After some research of gnu emacs dev mailing list, apparently originally the phrase used was “q.v.”, back to at least 2005-11-11 by Drew Adams at https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2005-11/msg00541.html

another post i found is

• From: Jambunathan K
• Subject: Re: C-h r and Images
• Date: Mon, 02 Sep 2013 23:01:36 +0530
• User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.3.50 (gnu/linux)
• https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-09/msg00017.html

i was sure that sometimes in 2015, emacs started to have lots “which see”.

According to git commit log, it seems there is no sudden drastic change. Odd.