Matt's reasoning is sound and explains the design decision well. That said, your argument appears to be based on something, the "conventions and standards" of IDE GUIs, that if it exists at all is a rapidly changing amorphous blob at best. I say this because I spend about half my day using *emacs. *If you invest in emacs like you invest in Leo you discover an amazing amount of power and configurability (and sometimes frustration). emacs strays perhaps even further from convention than Leo does but it is been around for 42 years and publicly available for 33 years!
emacs has seen many "conventions" and many "standards" come and go and yet it has remained mostly as it was since it was young. To this day it is not the most popular editor/IDE, not by far, but it is unarguably one of the most feature complete and powerful editors/IDEs in existence. In emacs you can get top level tabs for context switching through several plugins (or through tmux), it is a desirable feature by many dedicated and talented programmers. When I came to Leo I distinctly remember the top level tabs being odd, I didn't really make sense of it at the time but now that you point it out I realize it's because you are right that it isn't too common. However, not being common is a poor indicator of desirability. and utility. Based on my extensive use of Leo and emacs I would argue that the fabled "conventions and standards" you spoke of are yet young and naive and if they have settled on anything it is more by chance than based on merit. If anything they need to be tested, to authenticate their utility. Over a decade ago Microsoft decided to break convention with the switch to ribbon based menus and to this day they are cursed by many. The primary measure against which any software feature should be judged is in it's utility. To argue that top level tabs have markedly less utility than other layouts, to the point of driving users away from Leo, borders on nonsense. If any one thing drives people away from Leo it is by not giving themselves enough time to come to terms with outline based editing and the uncomfortable cognitive dissonance caused by the paradigm shift; in other words, *outlining itself*. To those ends Edward has put in countless hours trying to help new users understand how outlining works and how outlining can improve their workflow. There is no doubt that Leo could be marketed more professionally, given that Leo is not a commercial product it is hardly surprising. When somebody steps up to volunteer their time to take on that role I suspect Leo will attain greater use and visibility. Until that time I would advise all to think carefully before posting doom and gloom topics. Ask yourself, "will this improve the tone and efficiency of the community?" Likely the answer will be no. A simple feature request will have sufficed. As Matt said perhaps the location of the tab bar will one day be configurable, perhaps when there is enough public support to warrant it or when someone with enough desire takes it upon themselves to implement. On Tuesday, April 17, 2018 at 4:48:02 AM UTC-4, rengel wrote: > > Leo uses tabs to switch workspaces (contexts). Each .leo file can define > or redefine what menus, settings, plugins and so on are available within > it's context. So tabs are the highest level of containment. > > IMO this is only partly true. There are always menus, menu items, and > functions that are globally used (i.e. File, Help, View, the arrangement of > panes/windows) AND items that are context-specific, so it's not an > either-or question. Other IDEs (i.e. PyCharm) solve this dilemma by > providing two menus: one global menu bar and - within a tab - a > context-specific menu bar, sometimes even with an additional toolbar. I.e. > in the Web Development world this is exemplified by the CKEditor plugin for > web pages (https://docs.ckeditor.com/) or even the comment function of > this Google group. > > > Reinhard > -- 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.
