(How I feel about clones, YMMV)
Clones are really really good for creating task specific views of code, by 
gathering together all the nodes relevant to a particular development task, so 
you don't have to constantly scroll up and down the outline to get to the 
relevant pieces.  "Code" could be a manuscript or other non-computer related 
document that requires editing in multiple places.
Who uses them that way?  Well, Edward, certainly, and probably a lot of other 
people.  Clones are fairly safe to work with in this role, although I'm sure 
there are still ways they can have unexpected side effects. In this role, you 
typically only have one occurrence of each clone in a @file, the rest are in 
the Leo outline itself, but not in places written to external files.  This 
makes them less likely to bite.
What else do people use them for?  Template / snippet replacement for recurring 
elements like headers and footers in websites, blogs, and in code.  This seems 
to be the context that people most often (a) get lyrical about how unique Leo 
is for providing this great workflow, and (b) run into trouble because of the 
tricky nature of cross file clones.
I can see why people are attracted to clones for this second category of uses, 
but I'm really not sure they're the best choice. In code, wanting to repeat 
things may indicate bad design, you can usually define something somewhere and 
reference it by name in the manner appropriate to the language you're using. 
For things like website headers / footers, there are a lot of other ways 
without the extra load of avoiding cross file clone pit falls. Websites 
typically use some kind of templating system like 
http://jinja.pocoo.org/docs/dev/. And you can still leverage Leo to handle 
things like website headers / footers without clones. A *small* script could 
run through an outline generating web pages with common header / footer content 
pulled from Leo nodes.
Finally, for the task specific code view case, I prefer alternatives which may 
not be *quite* as fluid and seamless as clones (mainly for UI reasons), but 
have no sharp edges you need to be wary of. The bookmarks, tagging, and 
backlinks plugins are all options in this case, with the first two being 
particularly usable.
Cheers -Terry


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