Repeatable key sequence not working

[tkr911]

Hello,
Thank you for the wonderful package that you have written - it has proved to be very useful to me.

I have been trying to use the repeatable key functionality but it doesn't seem to be working.

• I am using Emacs 29.3 on Windows ( build 2, x86_64-w64-mingw32)
• I load emacs using the -q option ("C:\Program Files\Emacs\emacs-29.3\emacs-29.3_2\bin\runemacs.exe" -q)
• I then proceed to load the devil package using instructions from here
• I am able to type , pppp (which causes the cursor to move up several lines, as expected)
• However when I switch to directly typing n(i.e. without a preceding comma), I am expecting the cursor to move down one line (as per instructions here, however all that happens is that the letter 'n' is typed instead.
• Similarly, I am unable to use any of the repeatable key sequence 'n f b'.. etc

Please advise how I can get this feature working....thanks for the assistance...

Max

[morganwillcock]

I checked with an empty configuration directory and followed the same instructions which you linked, and it worked for me, so I imagine the problem is configuration specific. If you wanted to try the same test, just specify an empty directory as the init directory to use:

mkdir D:\tempconfig && emacs -Q --init-directory=D:\tempconfig

The most likely cause of the problem is that you had already installed the package from NonGNU ELPA, which is an older version where the repeat functionality is not automatically configured. It isn't straight forward to tell the two versions apart because the value of devil-version is the same between the two, but if you check the header in the file they will be different:

(find-library "devil")

The NonGNU ELPA version currently looks like this:

;; Version: 0.6.0

The MELPA version currently looks like this:

;; Version: 0.7.0-beta3

Assuming that MELPA has been added as a package source in the same way as the instructions describe, if you do have the older version and want to switch to the MELPA version, I think this would do it:

(global-devil-mode -1)
(unload-feature 'devil)
(package-delete (car (alist-get 'devil package-alist)))
(package-refresh-contents)
(package-install 'devil)
(require 'devil)
(global-devil-mode 1)

[tkr911]

Morgan,
Thank you for the response, and my apologies for not responding sooner - bit of a newbie to github and was expecting a notification from Github if I got a response and didn't see one, so I assumed that it had not yet been replied to.

• I checked and it seems that I do have the 0.7.0-beta3 version already
• I agree that it may be something in my configuration that is messing things up, because when I setup devil closer to the top of my emacs config, the repeatable key sequence seems to work.🤷‍♂️

I'm now moving on to adding additional keys to the repeatable sequence. I read the manual and it seems to be missing an example of such an operation - any chance this could be added ?

Also, the benefit of making all keys repeatable isn't immediately obvious from the documentation - could this also be added ?

Thank you ,
Max

[morganwillcock]

Hi Max,

No need to apologise, and hopefully you can track down the problem with your config file.

I'm now moving on to adding additional keys to the repeatable sequence. I read the manual and it seems to be missing an example of such an operation - any chance this could be added ?

Also, the benefit of making all keys repeatable isn't immediately obvious from the documentation - could this also be added ?

I've not tried these options myself, and if the descriptions in the manual are incomplete or could use more detail then it would probably be best to open a new issue for that. One thing to note though is that the version of the manual that is at https://susam.github.io/devil/ isn't necessarily the latest version - you might want to check the Org version of the manual that is in the repository to see if that provides any further details.

Morgan