On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 11:44 PM, Edward K. Ream <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Feb 2, 8:11 pm, Bill Baxter <[email protected]> wrote:
> Please let me know how the new isearch commands work for you. It > should be easy to add features, but the commands work pretty much as > in Emacs. I'm not sure how to get a working copy of Leo's trunk. Do you put snapshots anywhere? > People who haven't used Leo typically misjudge what is important in > Leo. That's because Leo changes how people work. More about this in > the next section. All these answers are encouraging. I think the issue I have now might be like the one the poster below suggests. You have various tutorials about the many advanced and unique features of Leo, but do you have a basic tutorial anywhere explaining how you just open edit a file? Like what M-x help-with-tutorial does in Emacs. I just fired up Leo and got stuck on how to open a source file, when Open... seems to only open .leo files. >> It seems to me that Leo kind of oversteps the bounds, going from being >> an editor to being a different way to work. More like a text file >> IDE. That's fine but I think (for better or worse) what most people >> want something that is essentially just an editor. > > I'm glad you said this, because it gives me a chance to repeat the > essential statement of my first post: > > To displace Emacs, an editor must offer much *more* than Emacs. > > To say this another way, Robin's post makes no sense if all we want > is: > > a) an Editor and > b) an Editor with all and only Emacs's features! > > Do you see? Nobody in their right mind is going to spend years *just* > duplicating Emacs. Emacs is *already* an open source project. Well, there's Cody Precord, working on Editra. For some people, having an Emacs-like editor that's not tied to Lisp is motivation enough. >> It seems Leo wants me to turn every little editing task into some kind of >> hierarchy-building exercise. > > Leo doesn't "want" you to do anything in particular, and neither do > I. Leo provides a set of new tools, not available anywhere else, and > not even "conceivable" in Emacs. What you do with Leo is up to do. > You certainly do not have to create hierarchies if you don't want > them. Sounds good, but some tutorials on how to use Leo to just go about your business as usual would be helpful. >> I have to admit I've never liked any of the "code folding" or "outline view" >> modes in any product I've ever used. I don't find them even remotely >> compelling. > > Again, I'm glad you said this. The problem with all other outliners is > that they have no memory, so the outline gets in the way rather than > helps. Leo outlines have "state" in two senses. The first (small) > sense is that it remembers where you left off before. Even this > trivial memory is a big advance over typical class browsers. > > The second (large) sense in which Leo has a memory is that Leo > remembers how *you* organized your data. And there is no single > "right way" for *you* to organize your data. You can embed > arbitrarily many of *your* views of the data into a single outline. > > I think you will find that what you can do with Leo outlines goes way > beyond any kind of outline mode you have ever used. In particular, > you will find that nothing in Emacs comes close to matching what you > can do with Leo outlines. > > So *of course* you don't see the value of Leo outlines. Yet. > >> I'd rather just have things presented simply, with a good way to navigate >> around >> (read, powerful search). > > Leo has powerful search, but searching flat text does not give you a > rich dom (document object model). From a theoretical point of view, > Leo's dom is the essential difference between Leo and any other > editor. Ok, but it should degrade gracefully to a 1-node dom being equivalent to "plain old text file", right? I think making this kind of thing work transparently is pretty important to getting newbies to not uninstall Leo the minute they find they can't open a text file. There are dozens of editors out there that are happy to open a text file with Ctrl-O and let you edit it. Leo seems to require something else non-obvious for this simple task, so it makes the road unnecessarily bumpy. >> It's kind of the same philosophy as you see in Sherlock and other desktop >> search >> paradigms these days. I don't want to spend time managing or navigating >> hierarchies. > > You might change your mind after you have tried Leo. I think both can be useful. iTunes has both hierarchical organization and fast search. >> Looking forward to your response. > > And now you have it. I'm looking forward to your comments after you > use Leo for more than a few minutes :-) I'm now looking for the "Using leo as an editor" section of the beginner's guide. There's a section on "using leo as an outliner" right near the beginning, but no section about using leo as an editor. What's the minimal number of steps required for an absolute newbie to open up grocery-list.txt and add "milk"? I think if you can soften the transition a bit from regular editor to the leo way, you can probably convince a few more people. I think this is probably what Kent Tenny is talking about with his slurping @autos comment below, but I don't know what it means to slurp an @auto well enough to be sure. --bb
