LEO: I love it as much as I hate it. Several years ago, I stumbled onto LEO and a screen cast that explained how to break down a complex HTML document into nodes that contained each component of the page (head, body, etc.) and further break down JS code into functions in each node, CCS statements, etc. and drill down into the complexity of the page by documenting it. AhAh moment! Leo could help me with that.
At the time I was trying to understand how to make simple folding sections for a rather simple HTML page meant to be a presentation. I know, I know, use Powerpoint, but that is besides the point. Looking at a simple CodeProject page source code for those folding arrows was too hard to understand. Maybe LEO would help me do like was shown on the screencast example? So I stuck with LEO and had gotten pretty good at what Joe Orr demonstrated again to me in the good example of LeoVue: chunking. Just as I was starting to be comfortable with some basic Leo commands, my XP box blew up and the loss of my work discouraged me from re-learning the little I knew at that point. I kept reading on LEO and a few years later I re-installed LEO on a different computer. I now started to use LEO to generate simple web pages with the @file command, but never really got organized in my mind all of the complexity of the myriad of commands. No matter how I read the tutorials, viewed some YouTube docs, I found it hard to figure out all I had learned on the XP box, buttons, having tabs for recent files, etc. I used clones of HTML parts to drag and drop between nodes that wrote to different HTML output files but have yet to figure out how break the link between clones so that a clone no longer is one so that it becomes a simple node that can now be modified without affecting its parents. Could have cut and pasted a node instead of cloning it, but organizing all heads or other sections of various html pages in one area using clones helped in quickly soot differences, etc. It is just too powerful for my weak mind, hence I hate it. Hate not LEO, but my lack of comprehension of how to best use LEO. Sometimes, a file created by a LEO @clean outline gets modified outside of LEO and now all kinds of artifacts shows up in the LEO file. Grrr! Leo is simply the greatest documenting tool for explaining stuff that can be written in external files. I am not a programmer. Just a tinkerer. It has so many, too many possibilities, that it confuses me to no end, driving me nuts. As stubborn as I am with tinkering, I think that it is this complexity of options that prevents a greater adoption of Leo to the newcomer. The tutorials explain very well how a specific function or feature work, but I have not found a tutorial as in LEO for dummies like me that would explain how to create a simple HTML page from an outline, adding slowly the concepts of documenting the nodes, commenting out HTML sections that are no longer relevant without them being written out to the external files, etc, colorizing the html or whatever language like in other scripting editors, etc. I yearn for the potential of LEO everyday I use it, yet am overwhelmed by all the features offered and hate it because of this. Like any complex relationship, it is hard to break this cycle of love-hate because I believe that some day I will have the ahha moment when the lights will turn on and I will discover how to use a feature new to me. I need structured learning and Leo is meant to be used to organize chaos by creating structures to hold data. But it does hand hold me enough to realize the full potential I know is there, waiting to be explained, understood and used. For a PIM, I use Todolist by Abstract Spoon Software and this is my preferred replacement for PCOutline that I have used for years ever since it came bundled with WordStar. Meantime, I keep reading all the discussions from all those brilliant minds that create and augment LEO in this forum, most of it beyond my level of understanding. Some discoveries like UVOutliner and the Brain mentioned help explore alternatives, but I keep coming back to LEO, in what might be a lifelong project. LEO: Love it lots, but hate not loving it enough to understand it fully. Gérard -- 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.
