Second Tree View?

[Thomas Passin]

The Freewin plugin hosts a freestanding bidirectional editing view of the body of a node. Would it be feasible to do an alternative view of the outline? Or is the outline too tied into the rest of Leo's infrastructure?

[Edward K. Ream]

On Tue, May 5, 2026 at 11:11 PM Thomas Passin <tbp1...@gmail.com> wrote:

The Freewin plugin hosts a freestanding bidirectional editing view of the body of a node. Would it be feasible to do an alternative view of the outline? Or is the outline too tied into the rest of Leo's infrastructure?

Great question. The short (wise-ass) answer is that anything is possible :-)

It's funny you should ask this question now. My brother Speed and I were discussing Flowchart Maker a few days ago. Speed likes this tool for visualizing parts of his code. We compared Flowchart Maker to Leo. The FM's visual aspects are appealing in some situations.

I've sometimes wondered about your question myself. My conclusions have been that there aren't compelling reasons to seriously consider such a project. Implementing it would almost certainly be (as we sometimes euphemistically say) "challenging".

HTH.

Edward

[jkn]

Hi Edward

    did you mean to link to the draw.io web app when referring to 'Flowchart Maker'? I know it lists itself as one of those but I am wondering if you meant something else...

Regards, J^n

[Thomas Passin]

On Wednesday, May 6, 2026 at 6:13:21 AM UTC-4 Edward K. Ream wrote:

On Tue, May 5, 2026 at 11:11 PM Thomas Passin <tbp1...@gmail.com> wrote:

The Freewin plugin hosts a freestanding bidirectional editing view of the body of a node. Would it be feasible to do an alternative view of the outline? Or is the outline too tied into the rest of Leo's infrastructure?

Great question. The short (wise-ass) answer is that anything is possible :-)

It's funny you should ask this question now. My brother Speed and I were discussing Flowchart Maker a few days ago. Speed likes this tool for visualizing parts of his code. We compared Flowchart Maker to Leo. The FM's visual aspects are appealing in some situations.

The Leonine way  would be for a Leo script to analyze the code and create the instructions for a flowchart maker to create the diagram, which could be displayed either in Leo itself or simply left for the app or browser to display. I've done that in another context using GraphViz.

[jkn]

There are a lot of nice markdown formats to specify 'flowchart' diagrams [typically UML activity diagrams], FWIW.

I have used PUML and Mermaid:

https://plantuml.com

https://mermaid.ai

[Edward K. Ream]

On Wed, May 6, 2026 at 6:40 AM jkn <jkn...@nicorp.co.uk> wrote:

Hi Edward

    did you mean to link to the draw.io web app when referring to 'Flowchart Maker'?

Yes.

Edward

[Edward K. Ream]

On Wed, May 6, 2026 at 7:59 AM Thomas Passin <tbp1...@gmail.com> wrote:

The Leonine way  would be for a Leo script to analyze the code and create the instructions for a flowchart maker to create the diagram, which could be displayed either in Leo itself or simply left for the app or browser to display.

Speed probably knows that, but he prefers a slower, more visual, way in this case.

Edward