C-x and KEYPAD x look wildly different

[snowiow]

Hi, I'm currently checking out meow and overall I'm really astonished how polished this mode is.

I have a question: Somehow C-x and KEYPAD x yield wildly different outputs. If I understood KEYPAD mode correctly, pressing x afterwards should be the same as pressing C-x. However the follow up keys shown by which-key are wildly different. I have attached screenshots for both here:

C-x:

KEYPAD x:

Am I doing something wrong or did I misunderstood something about KEYPAD mode. Thanks in advance for your help 🙂

[eshrh]

If you're wondering about the difference in actual keys shown, its because keypad C-x will only show you keys that begin with control (when you press SPC x f you are calling C-x C-f. If you press space, you'll see only the keys that don't begin with a modifier SPC x SPC f is C-x f.

As for the color difference, formatting, and pretty symbols; i'm not sure but I can look into it

[eshrh]

You're right, something should be done.

I think a good idea could be to instead change the display format of your currently entered keys.
For instance,

Typing SPC x prints C-x C-○
Typing SPC x SPC prints C-x ○

I feel like showing both keybinds under control and plain keybinds in the popup window is a bit cluttered.

[DogLooksGood]

Well, Emacs itself has a way to name groups. Check this example

And meow follows as much Emacs does as possible, so the alias can be handled well. If you press, SPC x, you will see +kmacro-keymap. But unfortunately, there are some other ways to set description for groups, provided by packages.

[aisamu]

change the display format of your currently entered keys.

Would you think it's fair to say the "spirit" of which-keys revolves around discoverability?
Even if we change the display format to be more accurate, nesting multiple keys behind a SPC group might not be truly helping the user on that front. ¹

There's also some value in being less surprising even if meow is 100% correct (as evidenced by the number of different issues filed on this same subject)

I feel like showing both keybinds under control and plain keybinds in the popup window is a bit cluttered.

I 100% agree that too many keys shown may be overwhelming.
In this case, it doesn't look like we would add/remove entries compared to the "regular" view:

• C-; -> ;
• SPC -> ○-SPC

We could even argue that some would become less cluttered 😄

NB: not arguing against/for this specific implementation, just the general idea!

Footnotes

1. Speaking from experience 😅 - I come from evil and have no idea what the "regular" emacs bindings are. I usually M-x to find the command keys and take the opportunity to learn a couple sibling bindings via the which-key popup. ↩

[DogLooksGood]

You can use which-key with meow. The default popup shipped by meow is just a minimal implementation.

(which-key-mode 1)

And you will have something like this:

[aisamu]

(Unsure if you're replying to me, but just in case)

You can use which-key with meow.

I use it!
To confirm: I re-tried the scenario posted on #337 (comment) after explicitly invoking (which-key-mode 1) and got the same results