2.2 Aborting and Resuming Transients

To quit the transient without invoking a suffix command press C-g.

Key bindings in transient keymaps may be longer than a single event. After pressing a valid prefix key, all commands whose bindings do not begin with that prefix key are temporarily unavailable and grayed out. To abort the prefix key press C-g (which in this case only quits the prefix key, but not the complete transient).

A transient prefix command can be bound as a suffix of another transient. Invoking such a suffix replaces the current transient state with a new transient state, i.e. the available bindings change and the information displayed in the echo area is updated accordingly. Pressing C-g while a nested transient is active only quits the innermost transient, causing a return to the previous transient.

C-q and C-z on the other hand always exits all transients. If you use the latter, then you can later resume the stack of transients using M-x transient-resume.

C-g     (transient-quit-seq)

C-g     (transient-quit-one)

This key quits the currently active incomplete key sequence, if any, or else the current transient. When quitting the current transient, then it returns to the previous transient, if any.

C-q     (transient-quit-all)

This command quits the currently active incomplete key sequence, if any, and all transients, including the active transient and all suspended transients, if any.

C-z     (transient-suspend)

Like transient-quit-all, this command quits an incomplete key sequence, if any, and all transients. Additionally it saves the stack of transients so that it can easily be resumed (which is particularly useful if you quickly need to do "something else" and the stack is deeper than a single transient and/or you have already changed the values of some infix arguments).

Note that only a single stack of transients can be saved at a time. If another stack is already saved, then saving a new stack discards the previous stack.

M-x transient-resume     (transient-resume)

This command resumes the previously suspended stack of transients, if any.