Hi, [the subject of this thread is running away from its title (fortunately)]
> Indeed. Type the bulk in Emacs, then touch-up with a gui. There are > vague wouldnt-it-be-nice ideas for GUI interactive editing of LilyPond > files; but that's not going to happen in a year or two. Funny, when i started coding in Lilypond I did it exactly the other way round. I entered the notes in Denemo and then added lyrics, dynamics, choirstaves and whatever by hand. But Denemo does not exactly save you keystrokes; and in addition to Lily syntax you have to learn its many keybindings (this holds for any GUI). Maybe that can be improved if you can enter notes with mouse point&click � la Rosegarden. But after you have entered the bulk of the notes you get into an editing phase (correction, restructuring, polishing...). And there I want a powerful text editor (vim for me). The nice thing of the text editor is that I don't have to learn new editing syntax, I can use all my old editing skills & tricks & macros. I cannot imagine a GUI as powerful and efficient as vim (or emacs). One vim command corresponds to many, many entries in GUI menus. Besides, I learned that it is extremely important to give a good layout to the source file. Lilypond lets the user very free in this and frequently you see horrible abuse of this freedom here on the list or elsewhere. Ironically, by looking at the lily source output of Denemo (among others) I developed a layout/coding style with which I did not feel the need for a GUI anymore at all. Never more than one bar of notes per line, function of each section of code should be clear from indentation and/or short comments, extensive use of (instructively named) variables, etcetera. When you are familiar with the Lilypond syntax (which is the case after you coded, say, <handwave> five songs or so </handwave> from scratch up to final version) and discipline yourself to good layout/coding practice, then the lily source is almost as clear & instructive as the actual score. Of course I want visual feedback frequently. But well, I just don't write all the code at once. Whenever I have added a few bars or so (depending on the number of voices/staves etc) I rerun lily so I see the score grow and mistakes of any nature (grammatical, musical) quickly show up. One more thing (besides ugly coded lily sources) that I think scares people away from lilycoding themselves and wanting a GUI instead is cryptical and copious error output. Junking bar requests, spewing backtraces and showing pages full of details about font generation is not exactly helpful in this. I have used lilypond since version 1.2.17 and have to say that it is getting much better already, but still I am so bold as to suggest that you split the diagnostical output into user readable & usable text on the screen and things like the above mentioned stuff which might be interesting for developers can go into a logfile. If a user asks a question and the developers want more specs & diagnostix they just ask to send that logfile and the user does not have to face all those scary d3t@i1$. Holy banana! THis is a long email... I run the risk of falling into the category of "people who talk a lot and do not produce useful code"... Promise: as soon as I finished my thesis I will produce code patches instead of emails. Cheers, David Boersma _______________________________________________ Lilypond-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
