On Monday, November 25, 2013 7:27:33 PM UTC+1, Matt Wilkie wrote:
>
>
> Why do I get the impression that you don't care for the accessibility i.e. 
>> of the settings?
>>
> ...image snipped... 
>
>> Who wants to read this?
>>
>
> I believe you are intending to be helpful, but the general tone of  this 
> message and a few others have come across as aggressive and inflammatory.
>
> My reaction on reading this comment was "why do I get the impression he 
> has zero appreciation for how much work has gone into this project?". 
> Actually that was my second thought, my first one wasn't very flattering or 
> conducive to a healthy conversation. ;-)
>
> -matt
>


Got your point, Matt. Thanks for sharing! You made me think, what keeps me 
with Leo.

Frankly, I don't care how much work has gone into this or that product. 
That's no criterium for quality or usefulness. What keeps me with Leo are 
mainly three points:

First its brillant concept of cloning, the fact that the same data can be 
used in different places/nodes of an outline, though cloning is not a 
unique feature of Leo. I.e there is TheBrain, a mind and knowledge 
mangement software. There cloning is completely transparent. One can 
graphically link any item with any other item. Alas, it is not open-source 
and not scriptable. There are free and commercial versions available.

Second the possibility to combine this nodes in arbitrary ways to generate 
external programs and documents. This possibility to combine nodes that 
flexible is quite unique.     

Third Leo's brilliant scriptability. Using Python for this purpose was a 
stroke of genius. Afik, no other IDE can match this flexibility (though I 
never worked with Emacs).

On the other hand is this user interface of Leo, and the way Leo is 
introduced to prospective programmers. It's no accident that Leo isn't 
better known despite its great unique features. One would think, 
programmers should flock, if only they knew about Leo. But no...

As if a Ben Shneiderman, a Jacob Nielsen, a Robert C. Martin and a lot of 
others, who cared and wrote about user interfaces, usability, naming 
conventions, codesizing and other programming topics, never existed. As if 
there aren't a lot of great free IDEs like Eclipse, PyCharm, Apple's 
development tools or Microsoft's Visual Studio are out there, that could be 
taken for a model. They have solved problems long ago that Leo still is 
struggling with. There one can study how settings, properties and the like 
can and should be presented to be easily accessible. 

Now look at the screenshot in my post. Well, my wording could have been 
'softer'. But do you consider this a good solution? Do you really want to 
read or write a setting like 'atautowarnsaboutleadingwhitespace' (no camel 
case, not underscore). This doesn't have to be this way. And this wouldn't 
be this way if somebody just had shown a tiny little bit more concern for 
the user. This doesn't evoke feelings of 'appreciation'. But this is what 
you have to struggle with day for day, if you try learn Leo. And if you 
have to waste your time with one seemingly simple task after the other, you 
don't think of the greatness but rather along the lines of the first 
thought you didn't mention...

Still, I haven't given up hope.

--Reinhard 

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