marginalia VS emacs-which-key

Check out marginalia[1]. Whenever you press M-x, it will pop up a buffer showing all the commands (with most recent ones on top) along with their keybindings and a brief description of what they do.

Embark[2] is also cool. It will show all the possible commands relevant to where the cursor is at that moment. I bind it to C-c a.

[1] https://github.com/minad/marginalia

Then there is Marginalia which is IMO essential

marginalia. Informative annotations for minibuffer completion candidates, co-written with u/minad-emacs.

Wow, interesting that my response is getting down voted. It seems not enough that I give away my work for free. Nevertheless I appreciate support from the community, as other Emacs package developers. The support is actually helpful. To clarify, publishing my configuration would translate into quite a bit of work, requiring separation of private and public bits.

marginalia for extra info in the minibuffer

There seems to be some problem with straight not correctly installing or updating compat. See these issues on Marginalia and Embark where straight seems to not install Compat.

Note that I contribute to Emacs core itself from time to time but the process is discussion-heavy and thus time consuming. If you are familiar with the completing-read API, you may know the annotation-function of completion tables. The name already tells that this function just adds annotations to the completion candidates. The Marginalia package (written by /u/oantolin and me) provides such annotations. A similar function is the group-function, which groups candidates in subsets and adds titles above the subsets. I wrote the patch which added this feature to Emacs. It is now supported by default completion, Icomplete, Vertico and maybe other UIs. The initial implementation was done in the earlier Selectrum package, and a little later in Vertico.

At the end of the year, I am happy to announce the stable Vertico 1.0 and Marginalia 1.0 releases. Vertico is a minimalist, yet flexible and responsive vertical completion UI. Marginalia provides helpful annotations for many completion contexts. Both packages have been solid for a while but I rather let things mature slowly. These releases finally put the stamp "stable" on these two packages. I expect the other members of the package suite to follow soon after. Both packages have been updated recently to support the newest Emacs 29 features. They are compatible with Emacs 27, 28 and the upcoming 29.

I) I started out trying to implement this using marginalia, like the consult commands, but quickly concluded that this wasn't the way to go here... please correct me if I'm wrong and there is more from these packages I could make use of. I also try to make use of as much of the citar codebase as possible, but have found it difficult so far: a lot seems too specific for bibliographic entries.

I can't find anything that seems to discuss them in detail, but Marginalia is a package that applies them widely in completion. And here is a simple example for customized file completion.

I think which-key already solves exactly that: https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key

As for the "complicated keybindings general" -- I assume because remembering things like C-x C-s is hard because of the shifted keystrokes? I get that, and there is in fact a solution for less used keybindings which I love, called 'which-key' https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key

I would recommend installing the which-key package, which is a fantastic discoverability aid. If you ever want an example config to get some inspiration, I have one here: Emacs Bedrock

Make sure you have which-key installed and turned on. When using a keybinding that has a prefix (like C-x or C-c), it displays all the keybindings that start with that prefix.

which-key for the shortcut menus

there are some packages to help with the keybings, which-key shows a list of keybind and its command and (guru-mode)[https://github.com/bbatsov/guru-mode] enforces to use the "best" keybind, for exemple, it forces you to use C-n to move the cursor, blocking you to use the down key, and if you press the down key, it show a text in minibuffer to the best keybind.

Thanks for confirming, I think it's an issue in which-key itself: https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key/pull/166

If you haven't already, definitely check out the package which-key.

> even though I'm a terminal user ... I really like the discoverability of GUIs, and that's where a good GUI is unbeatable by CLI.

CLI has poor discoverability? Sure; but even on the terminal, discoverability can still be good:

A couple of nice examples of discoverability in keyboard-focused programs:

- emacs' which-key[0]; there's a vim port[1] too. This shows you (some) of the available keybindings for the next input, and a short label. So you don't have to remember what `SPC h p ...` or all the options under `SPC f...`.. but it still helps to recall that `SPC h` is for 'help' related commands, `SPC f` for file related commands.

- emacs' magit[2][3]. Magit is so good at discoverability, that I'd rate it as the best tool for using git with. I've learned more about git from using it.

[0] https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key

[1] https://github.com/liuchengxu/vim-which-key

[2] https://magit.vc/

[3] https://emacsair.me/2017/09/01/magit-walk-through/

Am I right in thinking this is quite similar to which-key?