On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 9:47 AM, Kent Tenney <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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. > I agree. Good summary. > > How to ease the learning curve for those, aid discovery? > > I keep coming back to the minibuffer and tab completion. > Yes. These are key tools. And they they should be familiar to anyone who knows anything about Emacs, not just Emacs users. Or anyone who has watched the minibuffer video tutorial ;-) If the naming of commands followed a strict standard the result could > > be rapid, intuitive access to a vast range of capabilities. > Yes. Grouping of options is very important. Andrew Price discusses this elsewhere, but it is important everywhere. 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. > In general, I think this is a great idea. > > - help- documentation: help-panes, help-external_files, help-clones, > > help-rendering ... > Leo already uses the help and help-for prefixes. help-for-external-files is urgently needed. Reinhard and I think help-for-previewing might be a better name than help-for-rendering :-) > - show- for displaying values: show-commands, show-config, show-paths ... > Imo, print is good enough, but show might be slightly better, as you have argued before. > - do- for executing code: do-find, do-make-sphinx, do-pip-install > I'm not wild about this, because the extra prefix will slow experts down, without adding much. > - config- for accessing configuration: config-fonts, config-colors, > > config-paths ... > Maybe. print- (or show-) pretty much covers this. > > 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. > This is a great idea! And it can be applied regardless of squabbles about exact prefixes. > > Type a category, explore with tab. The effectiveness of the result > > would depend on > > how well the names were chosen. > To a certain extent. But the idea is powerful even without the do- and config- prefixes. That is, the real power comes from the choices that <alt-x> ? offers. There is plenty of scope for invention here even without renaming all of Leo's commands. > 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. > The notion of "hierarchical naming" has great promise. Indeed, many (most? all?) Leo commands *already* are named with a common prefix. Imo, the way forward is to design the output of <alt-x> ? so that it is maximally useful. A truly great post, Kent. 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.
