If you are an Emacs user who only uses 3rd party packages from ELPA or NonGNU ELPA, I’m happy to announce that Casual is now available on NonGNU ELPA. 🎉

If this is the first time you’ve heard of Casual, it is a project to re-imagine the primary user interface for Emacs using keyboard-driven menus. Casual’s design intent is to make the vast feature set of Emacs easier to discover and use in casual fashion. It does so by providing bespoke hand-crafted menus for different modes provided by Emacs. These menus are opinionated in that the design of what goes into those menus are editorially determined by yours truly. To understand more about what Casual has to offer, please peruse its User Guide.

In terms of implementation, Casual is built using the Transient library made by Jonas Bernoulli. This is the same library that powers the UI for Magit.

Development of Casual has been on-going for nearly two years now. Interested readers can read about Casual’s progress over that time from my blog posts here. Throughout it all I’ve learned a lot about Emacs, its ecosystem of modes, and the powerful features they bring. It has only reinforced my conviction that Casual makes these powerful features more usable beyond what is offered by default in Emacs.

To clarify, if you still get Casual from MELPA (or MELPA Stable), you do not have to change anything. The only difference is that users can now choose to install Casual from either MELPA or NonGNU ELPA. Updates to Casual will be distributed on both equally.

My thanks goes out to the NonGNU ELPA reviewers who have provided guidance in helping get Casual on there. Additional thanks goes out to all the Casual users whose input and support have kept me going at this since 2024.

emacs   casual