# define-help(2)

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## NAME

define-help - Define help information

## SYNOPSIS

define-help "string" ["section"]

Free form text

!ehelp

## DESCRIPTION

define-help provides a mechanism to define help information for commands and variables within macro files. The command allows user defined macros to be documented with help information that is accessible from the command line via the normal help commands such as help-item(2).

The help information is typically embedded in the macro file with the macro command that it is documenting. When the macro file is loaded then the help information is loaded and integrated into the existing help database.

string is the name of the item that is being defined, section defines what section the item belongs to. Following is a table of standard MicroEmacs 2009 sections:

`1` MicroEmacs command line arguments.
`2` Built-in commands.
`2m` MicroEmacs buffer modes.
`3` Macro commands.
`4` Macro language commands.
`5` MicroEmacs variables.
`8` MicroEmacs file formats.

When section is omitted is defaults to the general section which is usually used for the higher level help pages.

Text following the define-help line contains the help information, this is a free form text area that is reproduced when the help information is requested. The end of the text area is delimited by a !ehelp construct. The help text is usually displayed using a special hilighting scheme to control the colors and hyper-text links to other help pages. As a result the text may contain escape ('`^[`') key sequences, see ehf(8) for more information on the format.

## EXAMPLE

The following example is a define-help representation for the paragraph-to-line(3) macro.

    define-help "paragraph-to-line" "3"

    ^[cENAME^[cA

         paragraph-to-line - Convert a paragraph to a single line
    $a

    ^[cESYNOPSIS^[cA

         n paragraph-to-line

    ^[cEDESCRIPTION^[cA

         paragraph-to-line  reduces  each of the  next n  paragraphs  of text to a
         single  line.  This  is  used to  prepare  a  document  to go into a word
         processor environment where end of line marks represent paragraph marks.

    ^[cENOTES^[cA

         This command is a macro defined in format.emf.

    ^[cESEE ALSO^[cA

         ^[ls^[lm^[cGfill-paragraph(2)^[cA^[le.

    !ehelp

## SEE ALSO

ehf(8), help-item(2), define-macro(2), help-command(2), help-variable(2).

(c) Copyright JASSPA 2009
Last Modified: 2009/09/09
Generated On: 2009/10/12

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