Last year, I wrote about Charles Choi’s transient menu for isearch. The idea is that while widely used, isearch is a very complicated function with many options. Most Emacs users don’t know all those options and almost none of them know the obscure keybindings for them. Choi solved that problem by making a transient menu for isearch. Take a look at the above post or Choi’s original post for details. He’s since updated his menu to handle highlighting.
Choi’s implementation of the menu is pretty simple and he gives the source code for it in his post. Nevertheless, he’s just announced that he’s turned it into a package and put it on Melpa so if you’re interested in his solution and don’t feel comfortable dealing with Elisp, the package might be just what you need.
As I see it, there are two advantages to menus like Choi’s. First, and most obviously, they make it easy to invoke seldom used options when you need them. Also important, if not as obvious, is that the menu serves as a constant reminder that those options exist. I’m always rediscovering seldom used options that I’ve simply forgotten about because I hardly ever use them but that are just what I need for some obscure task. If I see them everyday, I’ll know they’re there even if I rarely use them.
It’s nice that Choi has made his menu available to us all and that’s it’s easy to get from Melpa.