I’ve written many, many times about how Avy is one of my favorite packages. Probably 90 per cent of my Emacs navigation is done with Avy. As I’ve said before, you can think of Avy as a generalization Steve Yegge’s recommendation to use search for navigation. Yegge’s idea revolutionized the way I navigate around a buffer and Avy refines that idea and makes it even more useful. As I’ve also said before, if you aren’t using Avy, you’re working too hard.
Now Charles Choi has stepped up to make it even better with Casual Avy. Like his other Casual packages, Casual Avy provides a transient menu to the functions that Avy provides. That’s important because Avy provides too many of them to remember.
Until Casual Avy, most of us solved that problem by restricting our use to one or two of those functions. In my case that’s avy-goto-word-1 and avy-goto-char-timer. Some, like Karthik settle for just avy-goto-char-timer. After reading Karthik’s post I’ve been using avy-goto-char-timer more but I hardly ever use any of the Avy commands except those two.
In a sense, Casual Avy gives you the bet of both worlds. You can still use mainly one or two of the commands but have instant access to all of them at the cost of a single additional keystroke.
I’m really enjoying Choi’s Casual packages. They give you access to all sorts of arcane commands without having to remember a lot of little used keystroke shortcuts. Most of the time, you won’t need them and that’s the point: you don’t have to remember a lot of shortcuts but still have access to the commands you seldom use.