0.5.0

Devil is an Emacs minor mode that intercepts and translates keystrokes to provide a modifier-free editing experience. For example, with the default configuration one can type , x , f and Devil translates it to C-x C-f. Similarly, , m s is translated to C-M-s. And so on. The translation rules are very configurable though. See https://susam.github.io/devil/ for the complete manual.

This release (v0.5.0) contains several fixes and improvements around making Devil special keys work reliably in various minor and major modes and especially in isearch-mode. This should provide a more seamless experience while using Devil special keys like , , and , SPC. Instead of unconditionally inserting a literal comma or a literal comma followed by space into the text buffer, Devil now looks up the current key bindings to find out what , and SPC are supposed to do with the current key bindings and performs that. For example, in isearch-mode if we now type , , it appends a literal comma to the search string (not insert it into the buffer).

This release now introduces the devil-describe-key command that can be invoked with the special key sequence , h , k. For example, if we type the Devil key sequence , h , k followed by , x , f then Devil is going to bring up the describe-key output buffer for C-x C-f which along with the description of the command bound to it, will also show that C-x C-f was translated from , x , f. Note that devil-describe-key is invoked with the special key sequence , h , k. The Devil key sequence , h k is free and translates to C-h k to invoke the vanilla Emacs describe-key command.

A big thanks to the small but friendly user community of Devil for providing feedback and reporting issues in Devil. Some of the changes introduced in this release resulted directly from such community feedback. Some members of this community were very helpful by providing detailed logs emitted by Devil while reporting issues. To make enabling and disabling logging easier, a new special key , h , l has been introduced. To see this in action, first type the Devil key sequence , x 4 b (or the vanilla C-x 4 b) to open the *Messages* buffer in another window. Then type , h , l to enable logging and , h , l again to disable logging.

A few other minor inconveniences are fixed too in this release. See the section for version 0.5.0 at https://github.com/susam/devil/blob/main/CHANGES.org for the complete changelog for this release.