...*show* me why Leo is great. I really want to love it, honestly. I *tried* to find it extremely useful ten years ago,
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I don't mean that I'm entitled to this kind of hand-holding; it's more, I think that this would be the kind of information that would draw many more Python programmers, and potentially other programmers to Leo.
there seems to be a big gap between those who dig it and those who don't, and I seem to be on the don't-dig-side. Not the fact that it can be useful, but the fact that ut can be useful to extents that it has some fanatic fans.
I tried using Leo for tasks that jumped at me, like, translating some code from Perl to Python. I did it by analyzing the (very poor) structure of that code in Leo, and it still took me a week; afterwards I realized I would have been better of, if I had just translated it to Python - command by command - , *without* understanding the structure, and *then* tried to force structure upon it; so decomposing and analyzing seems not be the right method for this kind of task.
Now, again, another task: I'm analyzing some Python code, much better structured. Still, it's quite complex, the state-machine it contains has multiple rather unclear transitions and conditions of changing transitions... Leo helped me only so much, but just the implications of this and that changing value in the code at runtime... is just not yet clear to me. Trying to analyze seems to be less useful than adding log entries to see the runtime values.
So, after seriously trying to use Leo for tasks that came along my way, and finding it nice, but not so useful that I'd say it's indispensable, may I ask: what are you guys using Leo for?
I realize that writing code of the size and quality of Leo itself is a huge task, and would be hard without a good tool; but are there smaller, but also very useful things you can do with Leo, which would be much harder without it?
(Yes, I have read the documentation; not I have not *studied* it).I'd appreciate examples which *show* me why Leo is great.
I am in a similar boat. I have at times used Leo extensively, enough to the point I have team contributor access on GitHub in spite of my novice programming skills. But, I've also dropped out, almost a year now. For the second time I've stepped out of the stream and back again. ((Hello Usual Suspects! Long time no talk))
The ipython bridge kind of filled the same need, but fell apart for me.
Pressing the scripted button causes the node and its descendents to be exported to a series of PDF files using Reportlab. The whole project takes less than 200 lines which I'll be happy to share.
Another task is searching log files of SAS program runs
...
I am a shoddy programmer whose first language is not Python, and project of sizes like this are about what I can handle.
I think it's important not to get carried away by their enthusiastic comments.
Hi,
For me, Leo is great for its community and for the ideas it
embodies. The main one, in my case, is being able to (de)construct
thinking with computers by building *emergent programmable outline
structure*. It took me years to understand the power of this idea:
Any part of a Leo document/tree can be accessed to program the
tree itself or anything in Leo. The first time I found this idea
with documents was with TeXmacs[a] at the end of 90's, then I
found mind maps, but they're not really programmable, and it was
really clear to me until I found Leo and used for several years
*mostly* for non-programming.
Even if now I don't use python as my primary computer scripting
language and I'm more interested in Pharo, live coding,
interactive documentation and data activism & visualization,
this Leo idea has been pretty influential in the way I write (see
[1], in Spanish) and in my research and related prototypes,
including Grafoscopio[2], a tool that tries to combine and
cross-pollinite ideas of IPtyhon, Leo and Smalltalk.
I was amazed when I realized, some weeks ago, the number of programming languages Leo is instructed to handle.
I'd appreciate examples which *show* me why Leo is great. I really want to love it, honestly. I *tried* to find it extremely useful ten years ago, when I stumbled upon it after reading about the greatness of outlines (articles from Steve Litt). Yet by now I have the impression that it's most useful in a greenfield environment, when you have control of structure, anyway. Being a contractor, hopping from project to project, I almost never do such development.
On Tuesday, July 5, 2016 at 7:46:21 PM UTC+2, Propadovic Nenad wrote:...I'd appreciate examples which *show* me why Leo is great. I really want to love it, honestly. I *tried* to find it extremely useful ten years ago, when I stumbled upon it after reading about the greatness of outlines (articles from Steve Litt). Yet by now I have the impression that it's most useful in a greenfield environment, when you have control of structure, anyway. Being a contractor, hopping from project to project, I almost never do such development.I'm using Leo for about a month now and know the feeling of really having *tried*; my first Leo encounter was with mac-only Leo 1.5 more than 10 years ago.After rediscovering it my personal Leo success story is a project (python + bottle + bootstrap to replace a Filemaker app) which lay dormant for several month and I was depressed every time I re-started development... it was a mess. The main problem being diverging HTML templates.
After I started unifying my templates with leo using cloned sections so several pieces of every template are identical, overview came back and while the project isn't pure fun it started making a lot of progress in the last two weeks. . . .
Despite the many uses let's not forget the origins of Leo: A literate programming editor.For me it's the first time I'm *doing* instead of *reading about* literate programming. With real projects. And it's increasing my productivity. And I have to be cautious because Leo is capable of ugly accidents (see: Leo highlights and annoyances as seen from a new user )And from my POV Literate Programming is still a field without a culture; everybody does something which resembles some aspects of what Knuth wrote about decades ago... but there aren't many agreed on structures and procedures. So we are all dabbling in a 40 year old pioneer field which brought us TeX & Metafont.That should not be all there is.
Leo is the best outlining editor available, period.
[big snip].
The most frustrating aspect of Leo for me is that I know there is great power lying hidden and dormant. Because Leo is pure python there is also a strong temptation to try to squeeze that power out of Leo. The truth is, Leo is huge, and no matter how well organized the code is (very well organized because it's written in Leo itself), it will always be just out of grasp for anyone other than fairly adept programmers and even most of them likely will not have the time to tame it fully. That said, I've written before that tools like vim and emacs suffer from the same problem.
Edward said Leo is not for everyone or for every task (I don't use Leo for everything), this may be true but that simple statement glosses over the truth. Tree/Node text editor's are for everyone. Everyone should have the freedom to organize code/text to their will and rearrange and modify it as easily as possible.