I just thought I'd add my thoughts to the pile (I'm responding to more than one thread of ideas; apologies for that).
Re text editors/lilypond environments and people's first experience with LilyPond: when I first tried LilyPond (on the advice of a friend who had never used it) I tried it using LilyPad and the learning manual. Although I eventually succeeded in creating a small score of about two lines I found the process so painful (I had never worked with plain text or any kind of code before) that I abandoned LilyPond, and only came back to it some time later, when I became more interested in open source software. Either LilyPad needs to be improved, or people need to be *strongly* encouraged to download Frescobaldi. For LilyPad to be a good enough (in my opinion) first editor for LilyPond files it should have syntax highlighting. (LilyPond comes bundled with files that do this for Emacs, so I assume it's possible? I'm not a computer programmer.) It should have a compilation option in a menu so that the drag and drop process is not necessary, and it should work on each of the main operating system types. Assuming this is a lot of work I would say just make people download Frescobaldi - without this program I would definitetly not be a LilyPond user. Re packages and modular development: I obviously don't fully appreciate the coding implications of what has been discussed, but as a LaTeX user the idea of making LilyPond a more stable base on which extensions can be added seems like a brilliant idea. I have to say that it is mildly irritating that so much of the list have been using 2.17.xx and its changed syntax and so on, while I am stuck on 2.16 waiting for the next stable version (I have one mission-critical project that I can't take any risks with). Kevin _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
