On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 3:33 PM, Bill Baxter <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I'm not sure how to get a working copy of Leo's trunk. Do you put > snapshots anywhere? Yes. http://www.greygreen.org/leo/ Your question illustrates why newbies are so important to Leo. I hadn't realized that there is no obvious link to this page. I'll put a link to it on Leo's home page and in Leo's FAQ. However, if at all possible, I recommend using bzr to get the latest version of Leo. In the long run, this is much more convenient than getting snapshots. Furthermore, bzr is a superb tool, well worth learning in its own right. Leo has benefited greatly from bzr branches created by developers. And you will need to use bzr if you intend to extend Leo. For instructions about bzr, see the first entry in Leo's FAQ: http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/FAQ.html#how-do-i-use-bzr-to-get-the-latest-sources-from-leo-s-launchpad-site 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? Good point. Improving Leo's tutorial is becoming urgent. I'd like to rewrite all of Leo's introductory docs using a "story-based" approach inspired by the book "Ideas that stick". Using Leo to "just open and edit a file" would be one of the very first stories. > 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. Thanks for this comment. Until you made it, I had a blind spot regarding this. There is actually a way to get Leo to open a plain file in a wrapper .leo file, but I don't remember what it is and there is no way a newbie is going to stumble upon it. This is more than a mere doc bug. As you say, ctrl-o on a plain file should work. So we have a good collaboration going already. You've highlighted several things that will confuse newbies. 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 agree completely. I'll see what I can do in the next three days... Edward
