Leo is (and should be) complete

[Edward K. Ream]

At 5 am this morning, I declared the last Leo issue to be complete. I do not foresee significant changes to Leo in the future. See below.

Today is an intensely happy/sad moment for me. Leo has been my life for well over 30 years. I have no idea what I shall do next. I have deliberately put off those considerations until now.

Why stability matters

Imo, Leo (the python app) is no longer the leading edge of the Leonine world. That honor belongs to leoInteg, a plugin for vs-code, written by Félix Malboeuf. leoInteg communicates with Leo using Leo's server, leoserver.py.

Leo's stability doesn't matter much for leoInteg. Leo's server is flexible and could accommodate significant changes to Leo.

However, Félix is now working on leoJS, an all-Typescript plugin for vs-code. leoJS promises significant performance improvements over leoInteg. There is no need to wait for results from leoserver.py!

Leo's stability matters very much for leoJS. Félix is transliterating (literally line by line) Leo's python code into Typescript. It's a big job, but he is already well along. Changing Leo's code base would make additional work for Félix.

Summary

Today is a milestone for Leo and for me. It's an intensely happy/sad moment.

Imo, leoInteg and leoJS are now the leading edges of the Leonine world. These two vs-code plugins offer all the advantages of vs-code plus all of Leo's unique features.

I want to keep Leo's code stable so that Félix will not have to revise his transliterated Typescript code.

Edward

[Edward K. Ream]

On Wednesday, September 14, 2022 at 5:51:43 AM UTC-5 Edward K. Ream wrote:

> I want to keep Leo's code stable so that Félix will not have to revise his transliterated Typescript code.

Stability does not imply sclerosis. Plugins can customize Leo at will.

For example, a plugin could easily patch Leo's read/write code to support UUIDs :-) Indeed, Leo loads plugins before loading .leo files.

Edward

[Thomas Passin]

It sounds like retiring all over again.  There are a lot of folks who are very happy that you've stuck to it those 30 years!  Thank you.

[Edward K. Ream]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2022 at 7:34 AM Thomas Passin <tbp1...@gmail.com> wrote:

It sounds like retiring all over again.  There are a lot of folks who are very happy that you've stuck to it those 30 years!  Thank you.

You're welcome.  I never want to retire :-)

Edward

[Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas]

I join to Thomas' thanks. As I said, Leo and this community has been an important source of inspiration and I'm happy to be part of it since near 2005 and despite not being much active now that I use other languages (Pharo, Lua, Nim) Leo's mark continue in my way of thinking documents and computing metasystems.

Offray

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[Matt Wilkie]

I feel very lucky to have serendipitously chosen this month to peek back in at Leo and see what's happening! I echo Offray's comment that even though Leo occupies a smaller portion of my activity these days it's imprint on my mind and perception is permanent and abiding. Thank you Edward for all the work you've done and shared with us. You're willingness to think out loud and share your process of working through things in public via the mailng list at least as valuable as the code and application themselves to me. I count you and the Leo community among my mentors.

-matt

[Edward K. Ream]

On Wed, Sep 21, 2022 at 1:57 PM Matt Wilkie <map...@gmail.com> wrote:

I feel very lucky to have serendipitously chosen this month to peek back in at Leo and see what's happening! I echo Offray's comment that even though Leo occupies a smaller portion of my activity these days it's imprint on my mind and perception is permanent and abiding. Thank you Edward for all the work you've done and shared with us. You're willingness to think out loud and share your process of working through things in public via the mailng list at least as valuable as the code and application themselves to me. I count you and the Leo community among my mentors.

You're welcome, Matt. It's been a great ride.

Edward

[User User]

Hi Edward, thank you very much for your work! Leo is a great tool and helps me in my daily life!

Just in case if you're wondering that could be done next - let me propose a few ideas.

1) Is it possible to make Leo more easy to install? I'm struggling for a while with installation on Windows and still have no success. I tried to follow the instructions at leoeditor.com but with no luck.

I'm able to install Leo on Linux systems following my installation notes but... is it possible to include Leo in repositories of major Linux distributions, for example, Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.? Leo is an extremely useful tool and it would be great to make it more accessible to users. It is much more user friendly to install it using, say, "apt install leo" rather than doing the whole process manually.

2) I'm stuck at Leo 6.3. For me, it is critically important to copy text from Leo outside. I can do it in Leo 6.3 by right clicking in the text area and selecting "Copy Text". However, I failed to find this capability in the 6.4 version, so, unfortunately, newer versions of Leo became unusable for me due to this reason. I assume that it is my fault, but if I didn't find it, some other users of Leo could fail to do this as well. Appreciate any idea on how to copy text from Leo. I would love to use the latest version if I could copy text!

3) Do you think it is a good idea to implement Leo in a compiled programming language instead of Python to make the installation process more user friendly and to improve performance? My Leo directory contains thousands of files -- maybe it could be optimized somehow.

Thank you once again!

Kind regards, Serhii

[Thomas Passin]

On Monday, October 3, 2022 at 10:08:07 AM UTC-4 uu86...@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Edward, thank you very much for your work! Leo is a great tool and helps me in my daily life!

Just in case if you're wondering that could be done next - let me propose a few ideas.

1) Is it possible to make Leo more easy to install? I'm struggling for a while with installation on Windows and still have no success. I tried to follow the instructions at leoeditor.com but with no luck.

I'm able to install Leo on Linux systems following my installation notes but... is it possible to include Leo in repositories of major Linux distributions, for example, Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.? Leo is an extremely useful tool and it would be great to make it more accessible to users. It is much more user friendly to install it using, say, "apt install leo" rather than doing the whole process manually.

I think that part of your problem is that the line on the install instructions on leoeditor.com uses a type face that makes a double dash ("--")  look like a single one.  And I don't think that most non-developer people installing using pip need to use "--editable") at all.

Most people find that "python3 -m pip install leo"  works fine and is as easy as "apt-get install leo" would be.  Creating install packages for several Linux distros would require a lot of specialized knowledge and not be easy.  You could try to persuade, say, the Debian people to make such a package.  I realize that you have had install problems, but most people don't.  Ironically, some of my installs on Debian have in fact had problems, mostly due to a missing software library that Debian should have installed but didn't.  BTW, I haven't had any problems installing on Linux Mint, which I like better than Debian anyway.  Mint is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian.

2) I'm stuck at Leo 6.3. For me, it is critically important to copy text from Leo outside. I can do it in Leo 6.3 by right clicking in the text area and selecting "Copy Text". However, I failed to find this capability in the 6.4 version, so, unfortunately, newer versions of Leo became unusable for me due to this reason. I assume that it is my fault, but if I didn't find it, some other users of Leo could fail to do this as well. Appreciate any idea on how to copy text from Leo. I would love to use the latest version if I could copy text!

I've never had any trouble copying text from Leo to the clipboard, in any version of Leo.  However, you do have to actually select the text you want first.  Simply clicking in the body would un-select any selection.  If you want to select the entire contents of a node, select it using CTRL-A, then copy it.  It's easiest to copy using the shortcut CTRL-C than to right click and use a menu.  Actually, as I just found out, right-clicking and copying copies the entire node, with its Leo annotations. It doesn't just copy the selected text.  So just select the text you want and copy it with CTRL-C.

 

3) Do you think it is a good idea to implement Leo in a compiled programming language instead of Python to make the installation process more user friendly and to improve performance? My Leo directory contains thousands of files -- maybe it could be optimized somehow.

Leo was originally written in a compiled language.  But it would be essentially impossible for Leo to support many of its important features using a compiled language.  Development would be harder and slower.  And it wouldn't make the installation process any easier.  In fact, it would probably make it harder.

[User User]

Thank you very much for your insights! The recommendation just to use Ctrl+C helped, and picking Copy from the menu helped as well. I just too used to copy the text by selecting and right clicking. It is no problems for me to use the latest version now. Thank you once again!