A recent effort to try to publish the Casual packages on ELPA resulted in push-back: There are too many of them. After a bit of contemplation and external input, I made the decision to consolidate the Casual packages as follows:

1. A new base package named casual would be created to contain all user interfaces for the built-in Emacs modes it supported. The following packages would be superseded by casual:

   • casual-agenda
   • casual-bookmarks
   • casual-calc
   • casual-dired
   • casual-editkit
   • casual-ibuffer
   • casual-info
   • casual-isearch
   • casual-lib
   • casual-re-builder

2. Casual packages reliant on a third-party package would still be distributed as a separate package. Two such packages exist in this category:

   • casual-avy
   • casual-symbol-overlay

3. The package casual-suite would still serve as an umbrella package, in this case installing the following packages as dependencies:

   • casual
   • casual-avy
   • casual-symbol-overlay

I’m happy to announce that today that consolidation work is largely complete and available to the public. The consolidated package casual is now available on MELPA and that the related packages casual-avy, casual-symbol-overlay and casual-suite have all been updated to reflect said changes. To help distinguish these aforementioned packages from the past organization, all of them have been bumped to a major version of 2.

The packages superseded by casual will eventually have their distribution on MELPA removed, likely within a week or two of this post’s date. They have been recently updated to issue a warning to upgrade to casual.

Configuration Changes

If you have an installation of a Casual package prior to 2.x, your configuration for the Casual user interfaces should require no changes, particularly if you do not use use-package.

On the other hand, users who have configured Casual with use-package will likely need to take into account the consolidated package casual, particularly if it is used to download/update the package.

While we are on the topic of use-package, I have also made the decision to not provide guidance on using it to configure Casual user interfaces. This is largely due to the fact that I do not regularly use use-package so my knowledge about it is poor as well as my ability to verify its behavior. Rather than give bad guidance on use-package, I have chosen to not offer it. That said, I encourage knowledgeable use-package users to provide support for it in the Discussions section of the casual repository.

Closing Thoughts

For everyone who has been along with me in this journey of using Casual, I thank you and also appreciate your patience with these changes. Hopefully they will improve your user experience with Casual once all the dust settles.

If this is all new to you, then welcome! I invite you to try Casual out.

I am always open to feedback on Casual; please share your thoughts on it at its discussions section.

References

• Announcing Casual Suite

emacs