Philip Kaludercic has an interesting post on the new Emacs 28 context menu feature. It has some useful information on how to use and configure the feature. The TL;DR is that you can configure menus to be context sensitive. For example, if the point is on a file path, the menu can add an entry to open that file. Kaludercic gives several other examples and provides some demonstration code to show how the capability can be used.
Emacs 28 will soon be with be officially upon us—the first pretest has already been released—so it’s worth taking a look at Kaludercic’s post if you have any interest in this sort of functionality.
But my interest in his post really concerns a meta-issue that he raises: that of using a mouse and menus with Emacs. As I said just the other day, I’m content to let people find the workflow—Emacs-based or not—that works best for them. That includes using a mouse and/or menus with Emacs. Kaludercic feels the same—sort of—but is suspicious of those of us who avoid using the mouse and menus.
Contra Kaludercic, I’m don’t have a fear, irrational or otherwise, of the mouse and use it all the time in, say, the browser or others apps where it makes sense. But the thing is, in my estimation, it doesn’t make sense in Emacs. I don’t care what Kaludercic and Rob Pike say, I’m faster and more efficient in Emacs without the mouse. The same goes for menus. I always have them enabled because it’s hard to do otherwise in macOS but the only time I ever invoke them is for seldom used commands that I can’t remember and know is on a currently available menu. That happens no more than once every couple months at most.
Again, do whatever works best for you but grant leave to those of us who have other workflows to do the same.