Emacs: Contextual Interfaces in Casual Calc

Thanks for working on these "casual" Emacs packages. I've long thought it is lamentable that we mostly have two kinds of UIs:

* Those designed for power user speed, with seemingly little regard to novice-friendliness (e.g. bash, tar, find, Emacs calc, Vim).

* Those designed for novice-friendliness and aesthetics, with seemingly little regard to power user speed (many GUI programs, almost all websites, almost all phone apps).

It feels like we're very far from the Pareto frontier, and I wish more people thought explicitly in terms of getting closer to that frontier - that is, "how can we maximize novice-friendliness under the constraint of not lowering the speed ceiling even a bit". I think this could be done through some combination of autocompletion, cheatsheets that pop up automatically, and consistency between programs.

Magit-like UIs are a happy exception to the rule. Their speed ceiling is very high because they're completely keyboard-driven and have no animations, but their discoverability is good because they constantly pop up little cheatsheets of what keys you can press to trigger actions. I was able to start using Magit almost immediately after installing it, and learn it gradually without looking at external resources. Now I fly through the common operations on muscle memory, and it feels like it took no effort to get there. I hope that more programs copy this UI paradigm.

Whenever I find myself learning about something where I know that I will not use it frequently enough to actually remember its keystrokes/commands/etc. I create a new “personal documentation” for it as an .org file (I have a central folder and a git repo for all of them). Here I’ll write all the information (like keybindings, details of commands, common procedures, concepts, etc.) down that is specific to my own use-cases and organize it in a way that makes sense to me.

It takes some time and effort and may seem redundant when there is good documentation out there already (as with most of Emacs). But still I find myself wasting a lot of time looking for that one piece of information in the docs where I forgot how to even search for it. Maybe it works so well for me because I kind-of enjoy the process of writing it (which many people might not). But I feel much less frustrated afterwards when I come back to some tool or language after years of not using it and find it really easy to remember what was important to me at the time and how to do X.

Tools like Casual Calc are great because they reduce the need to do that manual work of going through the docs and writing down what one want to remember in a (for them) more clear/concise/practical way. However, the way they select and organize knowledge/commands only reflect the common use cases, so there may still be a need to write stuff down.

As a more general helper, I really like to use Emacs Calc with `which-key`, which provides a similar interface to see what keybindings are available under a specific prefix-key. What also helps is if you press `h` and then search for a specific function (`h f`), key (`h k`), etc. or just type `x` to enter a function name directly (or by keyword using text-completion).

I feel like the existance of "casual" is a symptom of transient being way too hard to understand