I have just created a new issue 
<https://github.com/leo-editor/leo-editor/issues/597>, and want to discuss 
it here.

jEdit editor had this nice feature. On every start a dialog would appear 
giving some useful tip on some not so obvious editor functions and 
possibilities, shortcuts, best practices, ...

Leo has even more functions than jEdit, so many that even core developers 
don't know about all of them or at least need to be reminded from time to 
time.

The first step is creating a list of useful tips. The second is to provide 
some GUI for showing them to user.

I don't know how jEdit chose which tip to show. I guess it was randomized 
but also keeping a track of which tips has been shown recently in order not 
to repeat them. 

Perhaps it would be useful to attach some tags to each tip. That way Leo 
could choose randomly among tips grouped around some theme that is deduced 
perhaps from a context. For example: if outline contains external python 
files, it can add python-development related tips, if the external files 
are rst or md files then it would chose among writing-documentation related 
tips, if outline contains web development external files, then 
web-development tips are source.

Tips can be written in following form: "Did you know that ...."
For example:

   - Did you know you can quickly sort nodes by pressing Alt+A or executing 
   sort-siblings in mini-buffer (Read more... <link to documentation 
   page>); <tags: ....>
   - Did you know you can quickly break one long body to a subtree of nodes 
   using parse-body command. <Read more>; <tags....>
   - Did you know you can quickly find all nodes that contains some text. 
   Just select the text (name of function, variable or just part of it) and 
   press Ctrl+Shift+F (Read more... ); <tags...>
   - ...


Perhaps we can have somewhere a page displaying the whole list with the 
possibility for each user to add new entries. It can be even one thread on 
our forum. Each post can contain one tip (or list of related items). It 
wouldn't be hard to make script that read all posts from the thread and 
parse then to some more pythonic, regular data that we can use to update 
leo-tips.json file in Leo's repository. (* file doesn't exists yet)

If we make such list of tips I volunteer to provide some GUI to show a tip 
every time Leo starts or on command show-tip that can be bound to some 
unused key combination. 

Leo documentation is large. It is unlikely that old users would want to 
read it all again, and yet new functionality is being added and documented 
constantly. The feature I suggest would make it possible for all users to 
read about all Leo features sooner or later, without forcing them to 
dedicate their time to achieve this.

Perhaps user can choose themes that interest him/her from which to show 
tips. I can imagine also that each tip has rating stars widget so that 
users can rate some tip as more useful or not useful. Later we can adjust 
likelihood of each tip appearing to be in accordance with users ratings. 
More useful tips become more likely chosen than those less useful ones.

Vitalije

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