Why can't Emacs on Mac OS X find the Info directory node?

Question

The default Emacs on Mac OS X, 22.1, appears to have some problems with the info/help stuff.

When you hit C+h i, it says:

Can't find the Info directory node.

It works in AquaEmacs, but I downloaded the 23 version of emacs precompiled binaries from here and I still have the same problem.

Answer 1

Two steps to the solution:

1. Find where the info pages are
2. Put this in your .emacs: (add-to-list 'Info-default-directory-list "/path/to/your/info")

You can find the GNU Emacs (related) manuals here: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/

Follow the link into which manual you want and you'll find a gzipped info version of it. Download, uncompress, and adjust the "/path/to/your/info" to point to that directory.

Answer 2

Also worth noting that when you hit C-h i emacs will try to find the directory node. Which is a file called dir in your info directory. The file on my system has this written at the head of it which explains:

This is the file .../info/dir, which contains the topmost node of the Info hierarchy, called (dir)Top. The first time you invoke Info you start off looking at this node.

It is basically a directory of all of your info files, you can add nodes to it as you install them, here is a snippet of the file on my system:

* Menu:

* Info: (info).         How to use the documentation browsing system.

Emacs
* Emacs: (emacs).       The extensible self-documenting text editor.
* Emacs FAQ: (efaq).    Frequently Asked Questions about Emacs.