Re: [ELPA] New package: transient

[Phil Sainty <psainty@orcon.net.nz>]

On 30/04/20 2:29 pm, Richard Stallman wrote:
> That focuses on _how_ it works, but could you tell us in concrete
> terms what job it does?  Perhaps show us an example of use.

I had a look for videos showing the usage of this package within
Magit and, if you're able to download YouTube videos, then I think
this one will help:

https://youtu.be/NDP91RNgT4A?t=180

Starting from minute 3:00 you will regularly see Transient buffers in
use, popping up at the bottom of the frame, showing menus of commands
and the key sequences which invoke them.  Some keys will change the
state of the Transient buffer by toggling or setting options (possibly
involving minibuffer usage to input arguments); other keys will close
the Transient buffer and initiate some action command (utilising the
options which were selected).  In Magit the options are shown at the
top and the actions at the bottom of the buffer.

In brief a 'prefix' key binding will open a particular Transient menu
to allow you to select from the set of commands under that 'prefix',
possibly configuring some options along the way to modify how the
final selection will behave.  It's a very nice approach in practice --
both efficient and informative.

In the case of Magit it helps to make some quite complicated or
obscure tasks remarkably simple to perform, by presenting all the
things you might need for a particular class of activity in one
easy-to-comprehend, nicely presented, keyboard-driven menu.

The itself video is a bit of a whirlwind tour of some Magit features
rather than a focus on Transient specifically, so it doesn't go into
any depth on how those menus work; but on the other hand it's pretty
short, and with the speed it goes at you will see several different
Transient buffers along the way, so hopefully you'll get a bit of a
feel for it.


-Phil