Unable to use Help function

[Ross Burnett]

I'm new to Leo (again). I started Leo on a Win 11 PC with Python  3.12 by importing Leo and running leo.run().  I have run Leo before on this machine in the distant past.

When I select any of the items from Help/Open Help topics, it flashes the subject for a split second in a new window to the right of Log, but then it’s replaced by the content of the Body window, in this case the initial “Here is a summary…”.

By the way, I was unable to post this using Win 11 browsers, because the post popup is only partially displayed in the bottom right corner.  I needed to use the IOS version of Chrome to write this.  Can anyone tell me what’s going on with this?

[Thomas Passin]

This is a temporary problem that will be fixed after the new work of establishing layouts for Leo's windows gets firmed up more.  In the meantime, you need to open the plugin that displays the help message first.  Once it's been opened once, the Help information will display correctly.

Assuming that you have the viewrendered3.py plugin enabled in your settings, type the following into the "Minibuffer" input box at the bottom, then press the <ENTER> key:

vr3

If you do not have this plugin enabled, then type vr instead. The panel that displays the Help information will open. Then you can ask for Help and it will display there. (vr3 is a command to open the viewrendered3 panel, and vr opens a viewrendered panel. Even if you haven't specifically enabled either of the plugins, viewrendered will always be available.) 

If you don't like the position of the new panel, well, that's what the new layout system will take care of, once it's finalized. In the meantime if you feel a little ambitious and want to try out one of the proposed layout designs, go to this conversation here on the Leo Google Groups site:

https://groups.google.com/g/leo-editor/c/RcXUlYqpTNc

You can read the whole conversation, but the key part is in my post (Thomas Passin) near the bottom that starts with "I have cleaned up and improved the LayoutDemo.leo outline". It has a Leo outline attached that will create a new menu named "Layout Demo".  Try it out.  If you like the control it gives you over the layout to Leo's main window, you can copy the settings over to your myLeoSettings.leo file and then the menu will be available to all your outlines.