Yesterday evening I saw that I had a few new sponsors and was wondering where they had come from.
So in the end something good came of it. The one time donations covered the bill, and I also got a few new monthly sponsors. (Well, unless you also take the hours into account that it took me to move to new hosting, then its way way below minimal wage, but as a maintainer of free software, I am used to that by now.)
Sooo... I guess I should take the opportunity and do a bit of marketing. I am still making a living maintaining Magit et al., so please consider sponsoring my day to day work too. Thanks!
That's exactly what I did! Though I would call it morbid curiosity. :P
After initial setup it was smooth sailing. Other more reasonable setups would also have been smooth sailing, but... they weren't setup yet. I was uneasy about the possibility of a surprise bill happening, as it eventually did, but until the brain dead LLM leeches came along, that just never happened. After a decade of it not happening, I wasn't that concerned anymore, but I guess when it comes to the AI bots, I had my head in the sand a bit. I still though something like a 500% bill might happen, not 5000%.
Once it did happen, I immediately shut my sides down, and within the hour the account was no more. On the way out I saw that you can now actually set a "spending limit", it still had a [new] next to it. I tried setting it up, but could only quickly figure out how to setup a notification. It might be possible to set an actual spending limit, but not in a few minutes -- probably got to read some documentation for that.
But even if this were a one click setting, it wouldn't have made a difference at this point. You do this once and I am gone. Also, I wanted to move away from Amazon anyway, so really, this was the kick in the pants that I needed.
For now I am using Github Pages for the very static parts, and the free hosting provided by my email provider, for the slightly less static manuals generated with Github Actions. I would have made sense to use Github for both (not least so that Microsoft could cover the cost of the bots they have unleashed), but I wanted to avoid the complexity of committing to the same pages repository from the CI pipelines of multiple package repositories.
> Transient UIs [...] could usually be replaced by just using a regular special-mode keymap in a custom buffer.
For people who can look at a list of key bindings once and have them memorized, maybe. Turns out most people are not like that, and appreciate an interface that accounts for that.
You also completely ignore that the menus are used to set arguments to be used by the command subsequently invoked, and that the enabled/disabled arguments and their values can be remembered for future invocations.
> The fact that Transient hooks into the MVC and breaks elementary navigation such as using isearch
Not true. (Try it.) This was true for very early versions; it hasn't been true for years.
> or switching around buffers
Since you earlier said that transient menus could be replaced with regular prefix keys, it seems appropriate to point out that transient menus share this "defect" with regular prefix keys, see https://github.com/magit/transient/issues/17#issuecomment-46.... (Except that in the case of transient you actually can enable such buffer switching, it's just strongly discouraged because you are going to shoot yourself in the foot if you do that, but if you really want to you can, see https://github.com/magit/transient/issues/114#issuecomment-8....
> has irritated me ever since Magit adopted the new interface.
I usually do not respond to posts like this (anymore), but sometimes the urge is just too strong.
I have grown increasingly irritated by your behavior over the last few weeks. Your suggestion to add my cond-let* to Emacs had a list of things "you are doing wrong" attached. You followed that up on Mastodon with (paraphrasing) "I'm gonna stop using Magit because it's got a sick new dependency". Not satisfied with throwing out my unconventional syntax suggestion, you are now actively working on making cond-let* as bad as possible. And now you are recycling some old misconceptions about Transient, which can at best be described as half-truths.
> The Magit experience is due to the use of the transient package for its UI.
(I'm the author of Magit and Transient. (Though not the original author of Magit.))
The transient menus certainly play an important role but I think other characteristics are equally important.
A few years ago I tried to provide an abstract overview of Magit's "interface concepts": https://emacsair.me/2017/09/01/the-magical-git-interface/. (If it sounds a bit like a sales pitch, that's because it is; I wrote it for the Kickstarter campain.)
Yesterday evening I saw that I had a few new sponsors and was wondering where they had come from.
So in the end something good came of it. The one time donations covered the bill, and I also got a few new monthly sponsors. (Well, unless you also take the hours into account that it took me to move to new hosting, then its way way below minimal wage, but as a maintainer of free software, I am used to that by now.)
Sooo... I guess I should take the opportunity and do a bit of marketing. I am still making a living maintaining Magit et al., so please consider sponsoring my day to day work too. Thanks!