Steve Litt wrote:
On Monday 31 December 2007 05:11, Abdelrazak Younes wrote:
So why don't you use LyX-1.5 directly then? Or more specifically what is
missing in LyX outlining facilities?
He Abdel,
I haven't yet used 1.5, but when I do I'm pretty sure I'll find one thing
missing in its outlining facilities: speed.
VimOutliner (VO) was built for speed from the bottom up. 100% keyboard driven,
no need to reach for a mouse. It uses the ultra touch-typist-friendly Vim as
an engine, and adds ultra-quick ,, commands for managing the outline. I can
compose and organize as fast as I can think -- a huge advantage when planning
a book.
I see.
I can think of two:
- section folding/unfolding: I don't really understand why this is so
helpful for some.
I couldn't live without folding (which in general outliner-speak is called
expand/collapse. It allows you to view the big picture and then drill down.
Well but you can view the big picture in the Outline dock. In there you
can of course expand/collapse any node. You even have a slider to
automatically open all nodes in the tree down to a given level.
It's a way of impedance matching the work to the mind. It's not about
navigation, it's about getting the optimal view of the work.
Please try 1.5 to understand what I mean.
IMO, the ability to jump from section to section by
clicking in the outlining dock is enough.
That sounds like an excellent feature. Perhaps it can be put into VimOutliner.
- drag&drop sections in the outlining dock: right now you have to click
one of the 4 outline buttons.
Yes, it sounds like dragdrop section moving would speed things up. VimOutliner
doesn't have it either. With VO, you collapse the section you want to move,
delete with dd, move to its desired destination, and press p or P as
appropriate. This sounds very Mickey Mouse when described, but it's not that
bad.
Agreed. Keyboard access is the main thing to fix in LyX WRT outlining.
Both features are not too difficult to implement provided that you find
a volunteer to implement them ;-)
If you (and others) could describe what you would like to have in the
Wiki, it would certainly be helpful.
I'm not too good with a Wiki, so I'll describe VimOutliner's features right
here:
Promote/demote -- headlines or whole trees
Action on whole trees is not yet implemented unfortunately.
Expand/collapse (also called folding)
Expand/collapse by headline, by tree, and outline wide
Some of these are possible in the Outline dock, but not all.
Body text that wraps (headlines don't wrap)
In LyX the body text doesn't show of course in the dock, only headlines.
Checkboxes with percentage completion
Sounds interesting.
Interoutline linking
I don't understand that one...
Executable lines -- any content can be viewed/executed from an outline
Neither this one...
Lightning quick interface for the touch typist
This is missing.
OK, thanks for sharing your thought. Maybe some developer will be
interested in the challenge :-)
Abdel.
