Re: SQ: why transient instead of enhanced keymaps?

[Howard Melman]

Karthik Chikmagalur <karthikchikmagalur@gmail.com> writes:

> I have spent some time thinking about this and writing complex Transient
> menus, and would like to point out what I believe are the two marquee
> features provided by Transient but not by keymaps (at least out of the
> box):
>
> 1. Visual menus with _bespoke_ layouts.
>
> 2. "Infix" behavior, where pressing certain keys in the keymap modify
> some intermediate state.  This state is then "consumed" by commands
> bound to other keys.
>
> I'm aware that this is a surface level accounting of the many
> differences, and Transient can do several other nifty things.  But if
> keymaps or a keymap-adjacent library could provide these two features
> out of the box, that would cover most simple uses of Transient in the
> wild, and such menus would be much simpler to introspect and debug than
> Transient.

I've created a bunch of simple transients for builtin
keymaps and even those they only make use of #1
they're much nicer to use for hints than just
C-h or which-key.  E.g., here's one the C-x r map:

Screenshot 2025-01-21 at 8.16.16 PM.png
Description: PNG image

But if bind this to C-x r I loose the builtin help abilities
such as where-is or M-x annotations with the bindings.
(Currently I bind this to C-x R to have both.)

If layout info could be added to keymaps or the help
facilities could introspect transients it would help.  A
"beginners mode" could enable showing these or not (like
which-key does) on a global or individual map basis.

-- 

Howard