The recent post “You don’t not need the mouse” by noa ks speaks to a sentiment that I’ve had for some time. Using the mouse in Emacs can be a good, daresay delightful, experience. Unfortunately though, Emacs has antiquated default settings that presume we’re all still using a 90’s style 3-button workstation mouse. In addition, the overreliance on reusing menu keymaps for both the main and context menus results in poor user experience. I feel strongly that context menus populated this way feel more like an inventory than a thoughtful selection of commands relevant to context.
Thankfully, Emacs offers the mechanisms to sculpt mouse interactions to contemporary (circa 2026) expectations. Over the past three years, I’ve taken advantage of them to implement the following features:
-
Mode Line
- Right mouse click on blank space to pop-up a window management menu
- Left mouse click on buffer name to pop-up a customizable list of buffers
- Double click on blank space to toggle current window to maximize or return to prior window configuration
-
Context Menu
- Context-aware commands for selected text (
use-region-p) - Context-aware commands for Org and Dired mode
- Context-aware commands for selected text (
-
Main Menu
- Add Bookmarks menu
- Reorganize Help menu
Several months ago, I decided these mouse interaction changes should be generalized into a package that others could use. So began the Anju project.
Today I’m happy to announce that Anju v1.0 is now available on MELPA.
Learn more details about Anju in its User Guide.
As Anju is new, I’m always open to constructive feedback on it. Let me know what you think. Work on Anju is ongoing with the plan to keep adding improvements to it over time, in particular with supporting more context menus for different modes.