Full text searching in Info mode with Apropos

Most Emacs hackers quickly memorize the myriad of help commands available to them in Emacs; among them, the humble M-x apropos command, a full text regexp search command that searches all known Lisp symbols (macros, functions, variables - you name it) and returns a list of matches. I should point out that – as the two are often confused – it has a closely-related sibling M-x apropos-command , bound to C-h a , that will only search interactive commands*.

What most people are not aware of is a little-known command named info-apropos , a full text search for Emacs’s documentation browser, info ( C-h i .) Not limited to just your Emacs documentation, the info-apropos command will also search other info documentation present on your system, such as the GNU CoreUtils manuals. What sets it apart from existing info commands like C-s (isearch) is that it will give you a full list of all matches and tell you what node it was found under. Very useful.