As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a big fan of Emacs menus. That’s mostly because I’m much faster if I can stick to the keyboard and, of course, my general desire to avoid the mouse when I can. Still, I admit that often the menus are handy when I want to execute some obscure command for which I don’t remember the name.
Others, of course disagree. One of those people is Charles Choi who has previously schooled me on the the proper way to configure Emacs. Choi likes to use the menus but he’s not always thrilled with their content. In a recent post, he take a look at the Tools menu and what’s wrong with it.
The post isn’t so much about what’s wrong with the Tools menu as it is about how to change it to better serve your workflow. You don’t have to modify the Emacs source for the menu. You can simply specify that you want to delete an item, add a new command, or insert a separator line. There are commands to do this to an existing menu so it’s easy to configure menus to your liking.
Choi insists that using menus lowers the cognitive load of memorizing commands and there’s no doubt that’s true but I’m of the mind that, at least for commands you use more than once a month, it pays to spend the mental cycles to memorize them and keep your fingers on the keyboard.
This is another one of those questions where there can be reasonable disagreements. In the end, it doesn’t matter much which side you come down on as long as it works for you.