2025-03-30       BUILDING A TRANSIENT MENU FOR ELPHER





For fun, I'm helping Matto[1] create a Transient menu for Elpher, the
Gopher and Gemini Client available as an Emacs add-on. TIL how to
define transient-colums.

Our attempt at an Elpher Transient[2] menu is inspired by Charles
Choi's excellent Casual[3] Emacs package.

Once we're ready enough, we'll share it.

The elpher-tmenu quickly started to take up quite a bit of screen
space. To save me from typing a thousands words:

  image[4]

However, Transient comes with columns built-in.

All this is needed, is one extra opening square bracket "[" at the
first Menu item you define in `transient-define-prefix', and then the
closing square bracket "]" where you want the columns to end.

To start, instead of:

,----
| (transient-define-prefix our-elpher-tmenu ()
|["Navigation"
`----

It is:
,----
| (transient-define-prefix our-elpher-tmenu ()
|[["Navigation"
`----


Tada!

  image[5]:





[1]: <https://box.matto.nl/>
[2]: <https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Transient>
[3]: <https://github.com/kickingvegas/casual/>
[4]: <gopher://gopher.hillenius.net/I/images/transient-before.png>
[5]: <gopher://gopher.hillenius.net/I/images/elpher-transient.png>



Alt text image (4) the image shows one Emacs window, with two buffers
each taking up half the vertical window.

Alt text image (5) the image shows one Emacs window, with the bottum
buffer taking up just one-sixth of the vertical window.