Every time I look at Eclipse I end up rededicating myself to Leo.
Eclipse has a lot of benefits, especially its great community, but Leo
makes so many of its features seem clumsy. And then there is Java...
So the thing to do is to make Leo mainstream by dealing with
sentinels.
I now know how to make sentinels less intrusive. The inspiration was
tiny urls.
Suppose we replace cumbersome gnx's (and the odious prompt for a
unique name when Leo starts for the very first time) with this scheme:
1. Each .leo files remembers the highest gnx ever used in it or any
of its external files. Call this number N.
2. When creating a new node, we assign it a number N+1. As before, it
is immutable.
3. Headlines will be represented by sentinels like this:
#@<gnx><x> <the headline>
<x> can be one of the following:
. No change in nesting level.
+ Increase nesting level by 1
- Decrease nesting level by 1
-n Decrease nesting level by n
We represent <gnx> as in a tiny url, that is by a number base 62: 26
upper case letters, 26 lower case letters and 10 digits. Even for
large, old, .leo files we might expect that <gnx> will require no more
than three base-62 digits: 62**3 is a large number.
Examples:
#@00. first headline
#@5ZQ+ another headline
#@6A0- yet another headline
#@Z-5 and another
The <gnx> part of a sentinel will never change, but the x part may
change as nodes are rearranged. However, changes will be minimal.
As always, there are complications with @others and sections
references, but that's a nit. This scheme makes possible the
elimination of trailing sentinels in the common case that one node is
followed directly by another node (rather than the end of a section
reference or @others range.)
This scheme is similar to Emacs outline markup. It should prove to be
more palatable to those who dislike sentinels.
Edward
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