How to interpret this Emacs magit help screen?

Question

I'm beginning to learn about the magit package for Emacs. The integration is nice. But I'm very confused about how to get help with it.

I created a temporary repository, added a file test.org to it and ran the command magit-status. Then I hit ? to get help. I figured that this means it displays the command available to me inside the magit-status screen. The screen looks like the following:

At the bottom are the magit actions available. Notice how it says s: Show Status. But s doesn't do that. It stages a file. And there is no u key, but it unstages a file.

Am I misreading this or am I invoking the wrong help screen or something else?

Answer 1

magit offers a form of context menus which fits with a keyboard-based input. Hence the key-binding depend on which menu you are in. Somewhat counter-intuitively, ? does not open the mode specific help (use C-h m for that, as usual). ? opens up the top level context menu, by invoking magit-key-mode-popup-dispatch. When in this menu, the available keybindings are different from those on invoking magit-status. In the status mode, s and u are bound to magit-stage-item and magit-unstage-item. Since they act on the item at point, it doesn't make sense to bind a key to them when in one of the context menus. Given this consideration, binding s to "Show Status" in the context menu launched by ? is quite natural.