Charles Choi has another Casual app on offer. This time it’s a comprehensive set of menus, Casual EditKit, that capture the various editing commands. On the one hand, these are commands that you really need to know to become proficient with Emacs. On the other hand, as Choi says, the menus serve as a means of discovering those commands.
The problem is that Emacs has such a rich set of commands for editing text that it can be hard to learn them or even know that they exist. For example, I am always seeing comments from people expressing surprise about the transpose-chars and transpose-words commands. I use them everyday and wouldn’t want to live without them, yet there are lots of folks who don’t even know they exist. There are a bunch of other transpose commands that I don’t have bound but that I know exist so I can invoke them—with the help of fuzzy command completion—as named commands when I need them.
This all works because I know these commands exist and it’s not hard for me to invoke them even if I don’t remember their bindings or they have none. The advantage of Choi’s Casual EditKit is that helps you discover these commands and once you know they exist, they’re easy to invoke even if you can’t remember all the details.
Choi just announced Casual EditKit so I obviously don’t have any experience with it but my snap judgment is that its main benefit is teaching a new user what editing commands are available. But, in the long run, every user is going to have to learn those commands. Still, I suppose the menus could be useful for little used commands such as, say, the rectangle commands.
In any event, Casual EditKit is a welcome addition to Choi’s wonderful collection of Emacs menus.