On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 8:40 AM, Edward K. Ream <[email protected]> wrote:

> Inspired by Terry's recent post, I'm wondering how many of you can
> tell the story of what you were doing and thinking when you first
> "got" what Leo was all about.  Such stories might help newbies, and
> they will help me understand the pathways people take to understanding
> Leo.

My "story":

- I bumped into leo 5 years back. This tutorial sparked my fascination:

http://www.3dtree.com/ev/e/sbooks/leo/sbframetoc_ie.htm

(yeah, they are not really up-to-date anymore. The best tutorial is
probably the "Outlining" one, with Friends, Enemies and People that
owe me money)

I played around with it a bit, but found myself unable to use it for
programming (the @root thing is not all that practical). Also, back
then Leo was too slow for large projects (we've come a long way
since). Still, a weird "charm" about the whole thing stuck to the back
of my head.

Here are some of my c.l.p postings from 2004:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2004-July/270849.html
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2004-July/270910.html

I guess I found myself not needing Leo that much back then - my job
was boring at the time, and I didn't have all that much to keep track
off.

Later, a colleague introduced me to Freemind (and my job had got
interesting enough to actually keep track of what i'm doing). I used
that for a while to keep notes about my defect fixing work (with chat
logs, tracebacks, interesting functions etc. associated with each
defect).

However, I soon hit the glass ceiling with Freemind - it just didn't
scale for lots of text and complex graphs. It was more of an
attractive toy, really. I then remembered Leo, and switched to using
that. Leo was a much better fit for my needs.

This was coupled with Edwards post to ipython mailing list:

http://osdir.com/ml/python.ipython.devel/2005-07/msg00015.html

This resulted in ILeo, which solved some of the woes of using %edit in
IPython, and revealed a whole new avenue of thinking about interactive
programming.

I got seriously sucked into development of Leo itself when the Qt ui
started happening. I had a very selfish motive for promoting the Qt ui
stuff - I had started working on Linux at the time (on the maemo/Nokia
N900 stuff I posted the link about), and the Tk ui was bad enough on
Linux that I either had to reimplement a Leo-like program myself
(possibly based on qleolite, branch still on LP), or wait for other
GUI plugin to emerge. But here we are.

-- 
Ville M. Vainio
http://tinyurl.com/vainio

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