I think a key to managing the complexity of something like Leo is 'discoverability', how much effort is required to learn the location of Leo's capability. One element of this is familiarity, recognizing and complying with common patterns. This is limited by the extent of 'common patterns', Leo's power lies, in great measure, in it's support of 'uncommon patterns': the Leonine way.
How to ease the learning curve for those, aid discovery? I keep coming back to the minibuffer and tab completion. If the naming of commands followed a strict standard the result could be rapid, intuitive access to a vast range of capabilities. The commands could be dash separated words, representing a hierarchy of capability and documentation. The first word would indicate main areas of interest, following words provide increasing levels of specificity. - help- documentation: help-panes, help-external_files, help-clones, help-rendering ... - show- for displaying values: show-commands, show-config, show-paths ... - do- for executing code: do-find, do-make-sphinx, do-pip-install - config- for accessing configuration: config-fonts, config-colors, config-paths ... A special character could list the top level words: <alt-x> ? <tab> would provide a list of top levels with descriptions of the types of things in the subtree. I think this would offer access to a lot of stuff with minimal cognitive load. Type a category, explore with tab. The effectiveness of the result would depend on how well the names were chosen. This post is in the spirit of 'thinking out loud' on my part, I've been trying to come up with a generic framework to ease the implementation of such a scheme, so it's useful for me to write it down. Thanks, Kent On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 9:17 AM, Edward K. Ream <[email protected]> wrote: > From http://youtu.be/xYiiD-p2q80 at 12:13: > > We want to avoid the tap that turns the wrong way: that leads to confusion, > frustration and anger. > > In general, Leo's outlines are familiar: clicks work as expected, as do > arrow keys, which are based on Windows Explorer. > > Here are the problem areas for Leo: > > QQQ > If you're not going to use an existing convention, you need to be sure that > what you're replacing it with either: > > a) is so clear and self explanatory that there's no learning curve (so it's > as good as a convention) or > > b) adds so much value that it's worth the small learning curve. > QQQ > > You could say that having source files be *nothing but* text is the > "existing convention". In this sense, @others and section references are > something new. Obviously, point a does not apply. Just as obviously, there > is no way I would ever get rid of @others or section references. Indeed, > learning how to create text *is* worth the learning curve, but it's really > really important to make sure people can indeed create external files. > > Another applicable quote: > > QQQ > Even when people know they *could* solve a problem or perform a calculation > if they put *effort* into it sometimes they *don't do it* because they don't > consider the *potential reward* worth the effort. > QQQ > > No doubt some people have given up on Leo because of just this point. > Indeed, I suspect many people never even consider using Leo because they > don't realize how limited plain text files are. I'm not sure how to deal > with this, but the enthusiastic reaction of people who *do* use Leo shows > that there is a real difference between the Leonine way and the plain old > way ;-) > > Edward > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "leo-editor" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
