On Wed, 10 Sep 2014 17:27:28 -0500
"Edward K. Ream" <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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

[snip]

> 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 ;-)

I think we can shoot for the best of both worlds here, the template
system can provide a tree of simple Leo settings for all the simple
design elements (colors, fonts, font sizes, border widths, etc.)  If
you want a gradient fill that changes when you hover over a widget,
*then* you'd need to hack the stylesheet yourself, but for the core
stuff, a simple user editable tree (Leo outline) of settings should be
possible.

> > 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.

This is true in general for settings - for style related stuff (colors,
fonts, font sizes, border widths, etc.) restarting is not necessary.

> > 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.

Although I'm not thinking of combo boxes and tick boxes immediately
(although they might not be that hard to layer on top of @color and
@string nodes etc.) I think the simple menu taking you to the right
part of a simple settings tree for things like colors, fonts, font
sizes, border widths, etc. will help a lot.  That really is the first
non-bug fixing thing I want to spend Leo time on, I just wish I had
more of it.  I get tired of hearing myself say I'm going to do X and
not getting it done.

I would think that there are some settings which will always require a
restart, seeing plugins can use settings in just about anyway they
want, and don't monitor them for changes later.

Cheers -Terry

> 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
> 

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