Create Nested Menus in Doom Emacs

This may be documented in the Doom Emacs documentation, but I’m trying to log my efforts for future reference. General reference information is useful to everyone, including my future self.

Recently, I looked into leveling-up my Doom Emacs configuration. Doom provides a slick menu-system that activates with a press of the “leader key.” As a previous Spacemacs user, I stick with the default leader key, SPC.

One thing I wanted to test was making Emacs registers easier to use from the keyboard. Emacs registers allow you to assign a single character to a location in a buffer, then quickly jump to any of these locations. You can store registers with the function register-to-point, and return to a register with the function jump-to-register.

Unfortunately, neither of these functions were mapped to keys, which made me unlikely to use them. My first pass at a solution was:

(map! :leader
      "rs" #'point-to-register
      "rj" #'jump-to-register)

This works and allows me to type SPC r s or SPC j s to execute these commands. However, the top-level menu lacked a meaningful description for the command-group. When I hit SPC, I saw a table of commands including r +prefix. These labels can certainly be improved.

After some research, I learned that I could set both a top-level command category and provide meaningful descriptions to the function calls.

(map! :leader
      (:prefix-map ("r" . "registers")
       (:desc "Set register" "s" #'point-to-register)
       (:desc "Jump to register" "j" #'jump-to-register)
      ))

Here is the top-level menu after using the updated menu code:

And here is the nested menu: