10.10 Help on Active Text and Tooltips

In Emacs, stretches of active text (text that does something special in response to mouse clicks or RET) often have associated help text. This includes hyperlinks in Emacs buffers, as well as parts of the mode line. On graphical displays, as well as some text terminals which support mouse tracking, moving the mouse over the active text displays the help text as a tooltip. See Tooltips.

On terminals that don’t support mouse-tracking, you can display the help text for active buffer text at point by typing C-h . ( display-local-help). This shows the help text in the echo area. To display help text automatically whenever it is available at point, set the variable help-at-pt-display-when-idle to t.