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3.2.1 apropos

Function: apropos pattern &optional do-all ¶

apropos.el

Find all meaningful Lisp symbols whose names contain a match for the apropos pattern ‘PATTERN’.

‘PATTERN’ is either

• a word to match; if a word, search for matches of that word as a substring;
• a space-separated list of words of which at least two must match
• a regular expression

‘DO-ALL’

if non-nil, or if the user option ‘apropos-do-all’ is non-‘nil’, then apropos also shows key bindings for the functions that are found.

RETURN

The function returns a list of elements that look like this:

(SYMBOL SCORE FUNCTION-DOC VARIABLE-DOC
 PLIST-DOC WIDGET-DOC FACE-DOC GROUP-DOC)

SCORE

an integer measure of how important the symbol seems to be as a match

REST

Each of the remaining elements is a documentation string, or ‘nil’, for SYMBOL as a function, variable, etc.

‘*apropos*’ buffer

It also displays the symbols in a buffer named ‘*Apropos*’, each with a one-line description taken from the beginning of its documentation string.