emacs-light VS transient

If you don’t feel like going through this tutorial step by step and just want the code, you can find it at my emacs-light repo. Follow the README there to get started.

Short answer, if the only concern coming from (neo)vim are the keybindings then you can install the vim emulation package "evil" https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil and get started. The config that I build in this tutorial is also here https://github.com/shaneikennedy/emacs-light which has evil installed by default.

> Even in this article just a few sentences after stating we should start from first principles he then jumps into the assumption of the "desktop".

Agree. Although I can see how the idea of "first principles" can be a very difficult starting point. A blank sheet of paper is a scary monster.

There's a huge breadth and depth of non-"desktop" GUIs out there, some (like smartphones) are even wildly successful. It's good to explore them for inspiration. Some of my favourites:

- Arcan (https://arcan-fe.com/about/) - I won't attempt to summarize, just dive in!

- SailfishOS (https://sailfishos.org/) - mobile UI focused on interaction through gestures / swipes; I've used it as my daily driver for a couple years.

- Speaking of mobiles, classic Nokia UIs allowed you to navigate to a specific item in the menu by pressing the corresponding digit on the dial pad. Once you learned where a particular item is, accessing e.g. your SMS inbox was extremely quick.

- Apple Watch / WatchOS (https://www.apple.com/watchos/) - I've always loved the idea of a device where one of the primary interaction methods was a wheel/dial of some sort. The watch even gives you context-sensitive tactile feedback.

- ZUIs in general (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface) and the work of Jef Raskin in particular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software) - this is the guy who helped design the Macintosh, but his other work took a radically different route.

- Magit (https://magit.vc/). Many common git operations are reduced to a couple of keystrokes; the obscure features are more discoverable, and the cumbersome procedures (such as rebasing, or staging individual hunks) become simple and intuitive. Also check out transient (https://github.com/magit/transient), which is the "UI toolkit" that powers Magit.

True, and I'd personally rather move away from Emacs to something more modern. (Helix is great, although I appreciate the irony of it being terminal-only, while Emacs supports several different window systems natively.) Magit is the only real reason I'm sticking with Emacs.

Magit itself is powered by <https://github.com/magit/transient>, which I see more as an interaction paradigm than a library; it could enable more ergonomic interaction with other stateful tools that are typically native to the command line / terminal (such as docker/kubectl, systemctl, mpd/mpc, etc). Rather than using Emacs as a middle layer, Transient could build on top of pluggable native toolkit backends, such as Cocoa, Gtk, Win32, or even web or a terminal.

We continue investing into terminals because the terminal remains the lowest common denominator of interacting with a computer. On the other end of the spectrum we have Electron, which has very clear and obvious downsides. I think there is low-hanging fruit with amazing ROI somewhere in the middle, and Magit/Transient is an example of what it could be.

You can also manage via a holistic UI: - Bisection - Log and reflog, stashes - subtrees, submodules - certain third party subcommands like git-absorb, and extend it with your own - interact with issues and pull requests via forge - pretty much all of the hundreds of CLI flags via a modal UI that got generalized and extracted to a lib called transient - well-integrated diff and conflict resolution (which is mostly just smerge) - the rebase/cherry-pick workflows I liked the best, including support for --update-refs - at any time you can always press a key to see the raw commands and output that it's using, which taught me a ton of corner cases - IMO it has a great manual

See https://github.com/magit/transient/issues/239 .

More information can be found on my blog and in the release notes.

AFAIK :if etc. do not "live update", but only function on initial prefix setup (see this issue). You could use a sub-prefix that evaluates settings from its parent to set the available options. Another tip: add an incompatible list so you can't get two desserts:

Yeah, ok, simplest is then to just trash the transient folder and either let Emacs clone it again on startup, or manually clone it: https://github.com/magit/transient

M-x khoj RET c via transient

This is about resizing the frame, but might also be relevant: https://github.com/magit/transient/issues/216.

Will a hydra or a transient menu?