Yoshiki Hayashi <yoshiki(a)xemacs.org&gt; writes: The latter would be quite acceptable. You might consider implementing a context-sensitive menu that enables the user to choose between function and variable documentation. Also note that the same symbol can denote a face, a charset, etc. More stuff for the context menu. How much slower? You could fix this by having the help.el functions attach context-sensitive extents to important parts of the text. Then you could add highlighting and stuff by mapping over those extents. This would be less error-prone and would survive gettextization. I've used this technique to handle multi-line messages in log-message and view-lossage, and it worked nicely. Umm, no, please don't do this. It's a bit nicer to just define the face you want to use with the right properties, like this: ; assuming that defface now works for dumped code. (defface help-highlight-face '((t (:underline t))) "..." :group ...) If you want compatibility with FSF Emacs, you can create a `help-highlight-face' variable that points to the face. You could also suggest the same change to the FSF developers. The patch is vetoed in its current form, until further discussion.