Devil is an Emacs minor mode that intercepts and translates keystrokes to provide a modifier-free editing experience in a non-modal manner. See https://susam.github.io/devil/ to learn more about it and learn how it works.
This release (v0.6.0) updates the default translation rules to make key sequences involving the M- modifier easier to type. In some of the discussions in the Libera network's #emacs channel, some users of Devil have noted that with the default translation rules available in v0.5.0 and earlier, it was more difficult to type M- than it was to type C-M-. For example, we could simply type , m s to produce C-M-s but we needed to type , m m x to produce M-x. This was found to be counterintuitive by many because the default translation rules make the shorter key sequence of vanilla Emacs longer to type in Devil. Users who found this problematic often resorted to defining their own translation rules to work around this weirdness.
This release fixes this issue by updating the translation rules to make it easier to type M- key sequences. In fact, the default rules for M- and C-M- translations have been flipped around. Now , m translates to M- and , m m translates to C-M-. Therefore with the default translation rules, we can now type , m x to produce M-x and , m m s to produce C-M-s. See section Devil Translation Rules of the manual for an account of the updated default translation rules.
Note that this change does not affect users who define their own custom translation rules. However, this change does affect users who rely on the default translation rules. Although, I hope such users would find the new translation rules convenient and easy to adopt, I understand that not everyone is going to be happy about changes in the default behaviour. If you feel unhappy about this change, see issue #13 to learn how you can customise Devil to use the old translation rules from v0.5.0.
If you face any issue due to this change or any issue with Devil in general, please do not hesitate to create an issue on the issue tracker at https://github.com/susam/devil/issues. A big thanks to the small yet friendly community of Devil users whose feedback has been very helpful in nailing down the details of this release. May Devil cast a spell upon your fingers and whisper wicked secrets into your fingertips!