Today I discovered the command line pydoc tool, which give you man like functionality for Python. This is pretty useful, but not as useful as it could be. The best man tool that I ever used was tkman, which was a Tk based man page browser, which also used glimpse to index the pages. That made it a lot more useful. It's to bad that glimpse has gone away, I constantly find situations where I could use it. Of course, I could use Lucene.... The snappiness of Mail.app's indexed search is one factor that convinced me to bag Thunderbird. The handling of threads (while not perfect) was another.

My other discovery was two functions related to info files in Emacs: info-complete-symbol and info-lookup-symbol, which work off of Info files. So I grabbed the info versions of the Python documentation, appended the directory to Info-additional-directory-list, and now I can complete symbols from the Python standard libraries, and look up their documentation from inside Emacs.