On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 6:55 AM, john lunzer <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Leo is the best outlining editor available, period. > [big snip] > . > Thanks for all these kind words, John. > The most frustrating aspect of Leo for me is that I know there is great > power lying hidden and dormant. Because Leo is pure python there is also a > strong temptation to try to squeeze that power out of Leo. The truth is, > Leo is huge, and no matter how well organized the code is (very well > organized because it's written in Leo itself), it will always be just out > of grasp for anyone other than fairly adept programmers and even most of > them likely will not have the time to tame it fully. That said, I've > written before that tools like vim and emacs suffer from the same problem. > tl;dr: Understanding Leo's scripting tutorial all you need to unleash Leo's potential. The problem isn't as serious as you make it out, but a big Aha is required so you don't freak out. The Aha is simply this: you need to know *very little* about Leo (or Emacs) to make Leo do what you want. I remember vividly when I got this about Emacs. Sure, there are a gazillion emacs commands, but they can *all* be ignored if you like. Most people just use a few of them. The same principle can (must!) be applied to Leo. Yes, Leo's code base is huge, and there are too many plugins for me (or anyone else) to understand in detail. But that's not important! Instead, what you can (must!) do to master Leo programming is to master Leo's scripting tutorial <http://leoeditor.com/tutorial-scripting.html>. It will take a little work, but many, many people have done so. Once you understand c, g, p, p.b, p.h, positions and nodes, you can do a *lot *with the data in your outlines. That may suffice for most people. If you want to modify Leo's graphical interface, you must learn pyqt <https://riverbankcomputing.com/software/pyqt/intro> and Leo's body wrapper interface <http://leoeditor.com/tutorial-scripting.html#wrappers-vs-widgets>, which is described in the scripting tutorial. No doubt about it, gui programming is harder, but you use various plugins as your guide. As always, feel free to ask questions here. *Summary* You don't have to understand Leo's code base in order to write useful scripts. Instead, just use Leo's scripting tutorial. Leo's code base is a source of examples. Don't even think about remembering details about it. 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 https://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
