This post summarizes recent thinking. It's not a new topic: - #1409 <https://github.com/leo-editor/leo-editor/issues/1409>: About comm bridges. - #1389: <https://github.com/leo-editor/leo-editor/issues/1389> Create a comm bridge between org mode and Leo. - #906 <https://github.com/leo-editor/leo-editor/issues/906>: Dubious major projects.
This post revisits these topics, and attempts to come to simple, correct conclusions. *Each program creates its own culture* This is a fundamental fact. It's easy to minimize it's importance: *- Pyzo *lacks a minibuffer and a plugin architecture. pyzo is unsuitable as a host for Leonine operation. *- Emacs *is based on elisp. Using Leo's bridge would be a performance bottleneck. Emacs already has half-baked alternatives to outline structure throughout. *- Web browsers* are limited environments. The leoflexx.py plugin has unavoidable problems with key strokes. *The way forward* Other programs do have desirable features. I must first consider how their design interacts with Leo. It may be possible to reuse parts of pyzo's *code*, but this should be done by taking small steps. For example, #1283 <https://github.com/leo-editor/leo-editor/issues/1283>. *Summary* I have been tempted, over and over again, to merge Leo's features into other coding environments. This is generally a bad idea. Before succumbing to "feature envy" it's important to recognize Leo's unique strengths, and to consider how the culture of other programs affects what they can and can't do. Many "missing" features in Leo aren't necessary because of Leo's strengths. Edward P.S. I would like to say a few words about what might have been. Leo's history, and my own personal history, would likely have been very different had I understood emacs 30 years ago. I might have avoided much of the tedious work creating a separate editor/ide. But would Leo have been better in the long run? Would it have been more popular? It's impossible to know. The most important question is whether Leo's devs would have found Leo: - Without Bernhard Mulder, @clean would not exist. - Without e, there would be no @button. - Without Kent and Ville, the unified vnode world would not exist. - Without Ville, the ipython plugin would not exist. - Without Terry, the todo plugin, and several others, would not exist. - Without Vitalije, Leo would still be using file caching. - Without Joe Orr, leovue would not exist. And on and on... EKR -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/0dfde5eb-a852-4cd2-9b02-5ca14972c5b9%40googlegroups.com.
