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Collecting frequent-committer miles

Magit-Section as a stand-alone package

Magit-Section implements the main user interface of Magit — the collapsible sections that make up its buffers. How to use these sections — from an end-user perspective — is documented in the Magit manual.

I am now making Magit-Section available as a stand-alone package. The magit-section.el library used to be distributed as part of the Magit package and it still is maintained in the same repository, but now it can be used by other packages that have nothing to do with Magit, without having to depend on Magit.

The new Magit-Section manual is intended for package developers. A Magit Section Tutorial is also available. Unfortunately both documents are still far from finished. I decided to make this package available now anyway because Magit comes with many examples that you can learn from.

What’s next?

Well… gradual improvments to the documentation for one thing. ;-)

I hope that over time authors start using Magit-Section similar to how they did that for Magit-Popup, which also used to be part of Magit and then was released separately so that other packages could use it.

That package however came with scary warnings about it going to be deprecated eventually and in fact that has happened a year ago when I released Transient but I still maintain Magit-Popup and would fix bugs if any were reported. I intend to do the same for Magit-Section, so I skip the warning this time and you can use it in confidence.

By the way Transient 0.2.0 is due soon too.

And finally I plan to release Magit 3.0.0 in February. The first Magit-Section release will happen at the same time and it will be named 3.0.0 too.

Posted on 23rd January 2020