Transient Alternatives

transient reviews and mentions

• On Desktop GUI Minimalism
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Sep 2023

  > 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.

• Warp is a modern, Rust-based terminal with AI built in
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Jun 2023

  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.

• What do you use for git integration in neovim?
  8 projects | /r/neovim | 6 Jun 2023

  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

• Transient Demo Requests?
  3 projects | /r/emacs | 11 May 2023

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

• Transient v0.4.0 released
  2 projects | /r/emacs | 10 May 2023

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

• Dynamic Transient Infixes Based on Current Values of Other Infixes
  1 project | /r/emacs | 22 Apr 2023

  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:

• I cannot get EmacSQL to work
  4 projects | /r/emacs | 15 Apr 2023

  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

• Khoj Chat: A Search Assistant for your Org-Mode Notes
  2 projects | /r/emacs | 27 Mar 2023

  M-x khoj RET c via transient

• Transient for resizing windows
  1 project | /r/emacs | 6 Nov 2022

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

• quick-actions.el: Uniform Compile/Run/Debug across programming languages
  3 projects | /r/emacs | 12 Jun 2022

  Will a hydra or a transient menu?

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