Re: Jeff R: What emacs features do you want?

[Jeff R.]

I apologize it's taken me to long to follow up.

Again, for the record, I am a professional who codes for fun, and who 
enjoys writing tools that I use in my job. I know some python, elisp, and 
cs basics and use linux. (For example, I do not know what Pyzo is or what 
it does!)

Here are the reasons why I use emacs:

1. Orgmode

I do everything in orgmode, and by extension, emacs. Scheduling, task 
management, time tracking, note taking. I am able to change the views of 
the outline to show my daily agendas. I get warning of upcoming deadlines. 
I can view a calendar. 

For this, I think Leo, through the use of clones, would be well suited. But 
doing that is itself a huge project. Orgmode has been built collectively 
for many years, and it would be very difficult to build a version of it 
that would draw away an experienced emacs user. If done well, it would also 
attract new users. If really well, that plus python might do it. 

2. Elisp

The benefit elisp is that, with just a bit of knowledge, I can write custom 
functions on the fly, bind them to a shortcut, and be done. While not 
always pretty of the best tool for the job)), elisp opens the 
possibility of customization. The languge itself provides simple functions 
for navigating the buffer, navigating betwen buffers, text entry, changing 
color, etc. (I don't know if there is python library that does this.) It is 
simple to record macros, switch modes, install packages, and there is a 
large community. 

If I could do this with python, and write code that takes effect 
immediately and channges functionality in real time, I would love
that. I have no idea whether this is how Leo is, or whether this is common, 
etc. (I have also no idea what Pyzo is, or most anything else discussed on 
this listserv.)

Emacs also does an excellent job of exposing its documentation. For 
example, if you want to see the value of a variable and documentation for 
it, you press C-h v, and then you'll be prompted for the varialbes name, 
and the results can be searched through with fuzzy matching. The same can 
be done with functions with C-h f. You can also navigate to the source 
code, which shows the source, and all callers and callees. To me this is 
much more important than dired. I know people swear by magit but I have not 
learned how to use it.

Also if you want to see some quick videos of emacs-style tricks, checkout 
the emacs rocks videos on youtube.

Also, elisp is awesome and fun. Not always the most ideal tool, but it's a 
lisp and that makes it cool.

Regardless, if you could do orgmode--or something like it--in Leo I think 
that would be a big selling point. It would for me, at least, since python 
is just easier to use than elisp, no matter how cool it is. 

Offered for whatever it is worth. 













On Tuesday, July 30, 2019 at 11:08:55 AM UTC, Edward K. Ream wrote:
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 8:00 AM john lunzer  > wrote:
>
> I think emacs and pharo are extremely similar in scope. That is to say in 
>> both cases you can (and are intended to) spend close to 100% of your time 
>> within the computing environment. In emacs the features that help 
>> facilitate this are dired, vc/magit, and term/shell-commands. 
>>
>> I spend an enormous amount of my time in dired because it's just so well 
>> integrated into the rest of emacs. [snip]]
>>
>> vc/magit/diff-hl and other features make version control seamless and 
>> mostly painless. [snip]
>>
>  
>
>> Leo is very much like Org. I use Org more like a Jupyter Notebook than 
>> anything else. What I utilize most is Org-babel. [snip] Leo does quite a 
>> bit of what Org does already, they just do things differently.
>>
> [snip] 
>
>> If Leo had a multi-node body pane which reflected the indented 
>> structure/view shown in the tree pane then it would function more similarly 
>> to Org-mode than it does now. [snip].
>>
>
> Many thanks for these comments.   One of my goals for Leo is for it to 
> have all the features in this discussion of emacs 
> . I am not going to 
> rewrite Leo in elisp.  Instead, I'm going to write the appropriate parts of 
> emacs in python.  Or use Almar Klein's code ;-)
>
> Edward
>

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Re: Jeff R: What emacs features do you want?

[Jeff R.]

I apologize for my slow response. I do not know whether I am remotely close 
to the intended audience for Leo, but I can say that Leo does not feel far 
from the type of tool I would use  on a regular basis. 

By way of background, I am an attorney and I run a solo law practice. I use 
emacs, and particularly orgmode, to track various aspects of my practice, 
including scheduling, time tracking, note taking, and brief drafting. It 
really does everything I need in those regards, and importing all of this 
functionality, or even the bare functionality that would make me be able to 
switch from orgmode would be a huge task and not really what it seems is 
Leo’s target.

Outside of the organizing my life  aspect of my practice, I am also 
constantly working on a book of research on my areas of practice 
(constitutional law). My practice area is  academic. In this arena, Leo is 
superior to orgmode, due mostly to the use of clones. With my subject area 
it is impossible to create an outline that does not make heavy use of 
clones if it is being efficient. And clones make the outline so much more 
clear and easy to work though. But I can’t justify using a second text 
editor for this because orgmode is good enough for this purpose (and can be 
customized to whatever extent needed). But there are other things I like 
about Leo (python over elisp, for example) that still make me long to be 
able to make it a centerpiece of my workflow. 

Beyond orgmode, I find that Emacs is much more inviting to customization. I 
know how to do some coding, and have taught myself python and elisp in the 
last handfull of years. I do not have the time to do anything serious, but 
I write scripts for various tasks that I routinely use. In emacs, I 
understand how to easily create commands, even complex ones, and bind them 
to shortcuts. I can easily make use of hooks and insertion and movement 
commands, manipulate text, and really do whatever transformations I can 
imagine (within a text editor). While I think python is a much more 
powerful and useful language, my impression is that Leo does not create 
such an inviting environment (in terms of inviting and enabling users to 
customize the text editing experience) by comparison. It is very possible 
that I simply have not looked deep enough, or know enough about python to 
know how to do all of the things elisp brings to the surface (buffer 
movement commands, commands like save-excursion, save-restriction, buffer 
switching, font-locking, etc.). 

As I said, I also write programs from time to time and think Leo is much 
superior to org-babel.

So, the short answer is that I really need orgmode or a viable replacement 
for it, and I recognize that this is well outside of Leo’s mission, hence 
my question about Leo inside emacs.

Thanks for inviting further feedback. 





On Tuesday, June 25, 2019 at 2:45:23 PM UTC, Edward K. Ream wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 8:47 AM Arjan > 
> wrote:
>
>> Whilst there is a benefit to the "focus" of seeing only one node at a 
>>> time, in the cases where I use Org-mode I explicitly want/need to see 
>>> multiple nodes at a time.
>>
>>
>> This is something I would really like to be able to use in Leo. Both for 
>> writing text as well as code, being able to see the preceding and following 
>> node contents would be very beneficial. 
>>
>
> #1228  should help 
> considerably.  All the changes will be in the code that draws (redraw) the 
> outline.  It should be easy to create a command that toggles between the 
> legacy outline view and the "unified" view.
>
> Edward
>

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