On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 11:48 AM, Fidel N <[email protected]> wrote:
> I also asked for a settings GUI, because IMO, this is screening out a lot of > people that would otherwise use Leo for non-programming related stuff. Leo once had a settings gui. I ripped it out because it was a mistake. We aren't going there again. But see below. > Something as simple as Notepad++ settings/preferences menu, just a simple > tick menu, would make much more people remain in Leo. Imo, Leo outlines are the one and only correct way to organize huge numbers of settings. You won't change my mind about that. Leo has hundreds, if not thousands of settings. A flat organization would suck. And it wouldn't solve the more serious problems you mention below. > Even if you love the concept, clones, etc, if you must learn python and pyqt > and Leo structures and Leo @node_id inheritance before you can edit that, > you simply wont. There are two, no three issues here: 1. The Leo devs realized for the last major release that clones were a bad idea in leoSettings.leo. All newbies want and need to play with settings, and few if any newbies are comfortable with clones. So we decided that every setting would appear exactly once in LeoSettings.leo. Afaik, that has never created any problems. Furthermore, users are always free to use clones in their myLeoSettings.leo. 2. Terry has created a really nifty templating scheme. It's on my list to make sure that this scheme is explained clearly at the top of LeoSettings.leo, somewhere in the "About this file" tree. 3. The most important point you raise here is about the necessity of learning Qt stylesheets in order to change settings. This isn't great, but what we had before was worse: a huge number of settings that modified various aspects of Leo's appearance, without either the power or generality of Qt style sheets. > I know someone will think "its not necessary to know pyqt to change the > background colors", but I have been there, and otherwise you don't really > know what you are touching // how to edit that. Yup. It is, in fact, necessary to know Qt stylesheets to change background colors ;-) > Also, having to restart the app for every change to make effect makes > everything much slower (for a newbie), all of this resulting in non > programmers running away from Leo as fast as they can. There should be a faq about this. The trick is to edit the settings in one copy of Leo, and test in another. If the test file is small, this saves a lot of time. > Just a few combo boxes with option lists, + tick boxes for boolean values, > would make a huge difference. If the need to restart Leo was removed, that > would make things perfect. In general, I think this is a bad idea, but an exception might be made for the most important items: font, font size and maybe some colors. No way am I going to build this back into Leo itself, but it would be conceivable as a plugin. All contributions gratefully accepted ;-) However, this plugin would really like to update the settings immediately, which brings us to... Allowing settings to take effect immediately would be a major project, especially considering how many setting there are. Many settings are cached for speed, and such caches (ivars of some classes) would have to be updated. In other cases, gui widgets must be reconfigure based on the settings. All this is certainly doable, but it would be a major project, at least as big as the recent reorg, and possibly larger. At present, I am focused on getting Leo 4.12 out the door, so my appetite for this project is meager at present. > But then again, this is a dev time problem, so only thing I can do till I > get some extra time to develop that myself, is to remain extremely grateful > for Leo as is right now. :-) Thanks for your patience. 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/d/optout.
