I think why Leo behaves as it does and how it should behave are complicated by the problem of defining what Leo is.
Config. user friendliness wise I think there's a possible middle way solution where we make the Leoine way easy for non-technical users. I.e. a settings menu with a hierarchy that lets you select Settings --> Appearance --> Colors --> Backgrounds etc. I think we should get that far and then decide if more GUI is needed, or if the user can be expected to edit a list of background colors. Note providing a visual color picker would be a separate issue, I'm just talking about whether we can ask the user to edit a Leo outline to change scalar values or not. Anyway, as a first step, I've just closed https://bugs.launchpad.net/leo-editor/+bug/555014 Settings -> Open Personal Settings will now create myLeoSettings.leo if it doesn't already exist. Currently the created outline looks like this: Settings README @settings @enabled-plugins @keys @shortcuts myLeoSettings.leo personal settings file created Mon May 5 09:21:51 2014 Only nodes that are descendants of the @settings node are read. Only settings you need to modify should be in this file, do not copy large parts of leoSettings.py here. For more information see http://leoeditor.com/customizing.html (with no actual shortcuts defined in @shortcuts, just a comment about how to do it). More could be added. Cheers -Terry On Sat, 3 May 2014 20:15:17 -0700 (PDT) duf...@gmail.com wrote: > I am a long-time lurker on this newsgroup, and I have noticed that in > the last few months there have been significant improvements to Leo, > in the hopes of making it more accessible to the non-technical crowd. > It was certainly a move in the right direction but, alas, I think it > was not enough. The point of my argument is that Leo is still too > technically-oriented, and this alienates so many potential users. You > just have to read the posts on this newsgroup (as I have been doing > for a long time), to realize that people with little or no > programming experience are bound to find major difficulties in using > Leo, from the very beginning. Just trying to configure the simplest > (UI-related) settings is a major challenge. > This issue was already raised in the past, but is yet to be solved. > > Why can't we (non-technical people) be relieved with having to tinker > with the internal workings of Leo? Come to think of it, the > overwhelming majority of modern programs are totally GUI-based, so > that the settings can be easily changed via menus. Why can't we have > this in Leo too, instead of having to learn technical jargon and > manually modify settings files? I really don't get it. > > Please, consider doing something radical about it (e.g. refurbishing > the default menus with all the main commands and settings, at least), > or realistically Leo might be bound for extinction. > > All the best, > > Duf > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to leo-editor+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to leo-editor@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.