Charles Choi has announced some upgrades to his Casual Suite. He’s added two new interfaces along with the appropriate menus:
- Compile for compilation-mode and grep-mode
- Elisp for emacs-lisp-mode
He also makes explicit the support for an Eshell interface that he introduced earlier but didn’t write much about. Finally, a big part of this release is improved documentation, which he writes in Org mode, exports to Texinfo, and then formats as Info files and HTML.
As usual, transient menus are provided for each of the modes Choi supports. If, for example, you use the compile command all the time, you’ve likely internalized the auxiliary commands you need to negotiate the mode. On the other hand, if you only occasionally invoke compile, you may not remember all the related commands and will welcome the ability to popup a menu with those commands. As I’ve said before, having these menus available but hidden by default is a win. They only appear when you ask them to and then they disappear again.
Choi has put a lot of effort into Casual and it continues to improve and cover more areas. Irreal, as most of you know, is not a fan of menus in general but I do like the idea of a menu that pops up only when you ask for it. It’s the same concept as the excellent which-key: it’s there to help you discover commands that you don’t use often enough to remember.