Re: On the adoption of transient.el

[Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>]

"T.V Raman" <raman@google.com> writes:

> Jesse Millwood <jesse_m@fastmail.com> writes:
>
>
> I was more motivated to get it solved because where for you it was a
> pain-point, for me it was a show-stopper:-)
>
> Jonas' help got me over the hump.
>
> Stepping back, yes, transient, especially when encountered first via
> magit looks complex. But that complexity comes from how much more
> complex git is --- what transient does well is to make the large
> bucket-loads of git commandline options more tractable.
>
> It's also a very good attempt at bringing features of "direct
> manipulation interfaces" to the emacs world  --- I use the term "direct
> manipulation" intentionally, that is actually what people mean when they
> jump to a GUI. But transient shows that it is possible to implement such
> interfaces within the Emacs paradigm by stretching the boundaries a
> little, and where we do feel discomfort with respect to over-stretching
> those boundaries (losing isearch is an example), we can  claw it back.
>
> Note that  things like dired in emacs are also direct-manipulation
> interfaces --- they just preserve *all* of the goodness of Emacs.
>
> The other package that is similar to transient with many advantages  is
> hydra --- though I  haven't seen any hydras as complex as the transients
> that Git forces magit to require.

Are you sure it is Git that forces magit to be complex?

I think it is rather the design choice. Magit exposes 1-1 git commands as a
pick-from-the-list interface. I am not saying anything against, but the
interface to Git commands coould have been abstracted into something
that more resembles Dired or some other ux model. Observe, I have
nothing against Magit, I am just saying that nothing is forced. It is
all choice of how one prefer to use things.

There are other guis to Git, by accident I discovered one two days ago
(tips from a Linux magazine):

https://github.com/francescmm/GitQlient

No idea how good that thing is or other tools, I don't use any of those,
but it is fully possible to create ux that does not expose git commands
directly. Observe that I don't say it should be done, I am not against
magit or for some Qt gui, I am just saying, the ux and level of
abstraction is a design choice :).