Re: Exposing Isearch toggleable options

[Óscar Fuentes]

Aldric Giacomoni <address@hidden> writes:

> In the wake of magit, Mickey Petersen (who wrote Mastering Emacs) wrote a
> package called discover.el (blog intro + screenshot):
> https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/discoverel-discover-emacs-context-menus
>
>
> This might be a good direction for the conversation.
>
> I've been an emacs user for ~2 years now. I think some minimal
> documentation / toggles in the magit spirit would go a long way in
> demystifying the emacs behavior.
>
> As noted by someone else, I would consider it critical to indicate somehow
> that there are other modifiers and options.
>
> I would, of course, want a toggle for this.

I designed the Magit popup and implemented it on my fork (the Magit
maintainer at the time then reimplemented it with a few differences
instead of pulling my work, due to a miscommunication.) So you can take
for granted that I like the Magit approach... for driving git. The
same paradigm seems to work ok for parts of Org mode too.

However, I don't think that the Magit popup is the correct solution for
Emacs' poor discoverability, for several reasons. First of all, git is a
single entry point with lots of commands and options. Magit assigns a
key to groups of related commands and then lists the commands and its
options. In Emacs, there would be a large number of groups and, within
each group, lots of options. This would cause a high cognitive load, if
it were practical at all to browse the large number of entries.

I could go on about why the Magit popup approach is not the right one,
for Emacs in general.

The discoverability issue is a very interesting one. Even more when
combined with ergonomics and convenience in general. Not too long ago I
was surprised to see how discoverability *and* convenience are benefited
from having a good completion mechanism on the M-x and set-variable
prompts. Ido+flx was a big enhancement for a tiny effort, IMO. I'm sure
that other packages can bring similar or superior benefits.

Ido+flx work on command/variable names. It would be better to have
conceptual relations among features, and exploit those relations
contextually. Some type of smart search engine for features, with the
right interfaces.

[snip]