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justbur
emacs-which-key
Emacs Lisp2016–2026
justbur / emacs-which-key · Archived

emacs-which-key

Emacs package that displays available keybindings in popup

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14Distinct people
15Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.8KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Emacs package that displays available keybindings in popup

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year15 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-08-01 22:27:12 UTC to 2026-06-02 09:11:07 UTC.

01232016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

15 sources
noelwelsh·Jun 2, 2026
TUIs in Prolog sounds fun. The great thing about TUIs is that a simple text component is a universal widget. If the user can display text and capture events they can implement any interface components they want in terms of that. That said, whatever the framework provides pushes users in a particular direction. The core of the things I'm thinking of (some links below) is providing easily accessible context for the user right at the point where they are working. This can be completions at the cursor, or a quick key to pop up a command palette. Fuzzy search is standard. Here are some examples: * Corfu: https://github.com/minad/corfu * Vertico: https://github.com/minad/vertico * which-key: https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key * LazyVim: https://www.lazyvim.org/ I've included links that have screenshots showing how they work. The list is
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biased to Emacs, because I'm an Emacs user (Doom Emacs in particular) and so more familiar with that ecosystem. Hope that helps!
In Movwin: My (Unpublished) TUI Framework
rgoulter·Jan 7, 2023
> even though I'm a terminal user ... I really like the discoverability of GUIs, and that's where a good GUI is unbeatable by CLI. CLI has poor discoverability? Sure; but even on the terminal, discoverability can still be good: A couple of nice examples of discoverability in keyboard-focused programs: - emacs' which-key[0]; there's a vim port[1] too. This shows you (some) of the available keybindings for the next input, and a short label. So you don't have to remember what `SPC h p ...` or all the options under `SPC f...`.. but it still helps to recall that `SPC h` is for 'help' related commands, `SPC f` for file related commands. - emacs' magit[2][3]. Magit is so good at discoverability, that I'd rate it as the best tool for using git with. I've learned more about git from using it. [0] https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key [1] http
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s://github.com/liuchengxu/vim-which-key [2] https://magit.vc/ [3] https://emacsair.me/2017/09/01/magit-walk-through/
In Tell HN: Vim users, `:x` is like `:wq` but writes only when changes are made
gmfawcett·Jun 28, 2019
While I agree that a GUI can be a bit more discoverable in general, I don't think CLIs (and more generally, terminal-based programs) are necessarily for the l33t crowd. We've just been conditioned that way by the fact that most user-facing applications these days are GUI based. But think of the DOS-based programs of yore, like WordPerfect 5, and the Turbo C/Pascal IDEs... they had menus on screen, easy-to-access help screens, etc. to guide the novice. (What's the Web-app equivalent to the F1 key?) History shows that WordPerfect was fine to use as a non-technical person. (I wish our modern word processors were so simple to use as WP 5, actually -- modern app-design trends have bloated the word processor into a confusing mess, IMO, and I think the average office worker who has worked in both generations might agree.) I really like the appro
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ach taken by the 'which-key' extension for Emacs, which is particularly well used in the Spacemacs distribution. Pressing the space bar pulls up a very nicely organized menu of actions, including access to help. It's extremely helpful both as a memory aid, and also for discovering new features. Obviously a nice menu doesn't get the user fully past the initial Emacs learning curve, which supports your argument. But for the next level of user -- from novice to initiate -- it's a tremendous productivity boost. - https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key - http://spacemacs.org/
In Without a GUI: How to Live Entirely in a Terminal
vector_spaces·Apr 13, 2019
Fellow n00b here, but maybe a little further along in my emacs journey. I started with Emacs as my first editor when I first was learning how to code a few years ago. I played with it for about a year, then left it for VSCode when I got a job as the projects at the time were heavily JS/TypeScript based, then slowly went back to Emacs as I started to feel frustrated at how painful it was to do certain things on VSCode that I knew would be lower-friction on an editor like Emacs or Vim. This second time around it has helped me a lot to not feel like I need to rush to master it, taking time instead to focus on committing one or two commands to muscle memory every 10 days or so, and looking at other people's configuration files for inspiration. Studying these configs in particular [0], [1] helped me quite a bit, as they're nicely commented, bi
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g enough to have some useful stuff in them and get real work done, but small enough to understand fairly quickly. I also make it a point to not add stuff to my config that I don't understand and try to follow good practices around commenting and code organization Being OK with navigating inefficiently but making a conscious effort to learn one or two commands to handle stuff that feels painful (kill line, jump to beginning of file, jump to end of file, jump to end of line, back-to-indentation) then modifying anything that doesn't feel natural. Learning to find help inside emacs: C-h b to list all bindings in the current buffer, or discover-my-major [2] for a friendlier interface, or [3] (highly recommended) for displaying and filtering available bindings as you type them. Cheatsheet [4] for creating your own cheatsheets to note and recall commands you're working on learning. Finally, taking advantage of the fact that you don't need to leave Emacs for certain things. For example, at work we use Trello, and I love being able to check Trello from inside Emacs via org-trello-mode. It's very nice to not have to context switch when coding. Not to mention Magit (super powerful git gui inside emacs) and Tramp mode (for editing files over ssh from the comfort of emacs). Also, I've generally found people to be extremely helpful on #emacs on freenode IRC. I've learned a lot thru osmosis just observing conversation there :) [0] https://github.com/jsks/dotfiles/tree/master/emacs/.emacs.d [1] https://github.com/flyingmachine/emacs-for-clojure/ [2] https://framagit.org/steckerhalter/discover-my-major [3] https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key [4] https://melpa.org/#/cheatsheet
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