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Comment by stevesimmons | Hacker News Reader

It is a shame more people aren't aware of Leo (http://leoeditor.com/).

Leo is a hierarchical editor with a tree view of nodes, which can be in Markdown, ReST, code, and create compound docs a la literate programming from nodes, etc.

The killer feature imo is nodes can be cloned to multiple places in the tree. So you could have, for example, group notes by project in one master last, plus another sub-tree for clones from the master list of your own current projects.

Leo's web site may look clunky and old-fashioned. But don't let that put you off!

-- EDIT --

For what it's worth, I do oscillate between Leo and Emacs org-mode. I'd probably stay 100% with org-mode if there were a way to clone nodes. Does anyone know if this is possible?

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> org-mode if there were a way to clone nodes.

I believe that what you are explaining is essentially the equivalent to a symbolic/hard link.

As far as I know, one of the goals of org-mode is to have a format that does not diverge from pain text.

Similar to markdown, an org-mode file is always completely readable as pain text, whether using emacs it not.

That means the only way to have an updated "copy" (reference) of a tree would be to automatically copy any changes made to every copy of that tree. That would either require some sort of run-time mark (that would disappear as soon as you kill the buffer), or special syntax.

As far as I know, org-mode does not have such a feature.

A simple org-copy-subtree (C-c C-x M-w) and then paste (C-y) would do it. Or did you mean something else?

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/org/Stru...

From http://leoeditor.com/tutorial-pim.html, it looks like a 'clone' means that the node is presented in several places in the document, but each of those several places bring you back to one, single node.

It seems like org-mode ought to be able to do this, too.

At least, it's weird that emacs/vim _can't_ do something. I can't remember the last time anyone said that about, well, anything :)

A clone is not a copy. When you clone a node in leo, the same node can appear in multiple places at once. If you edit any of the clones, the original is updated.

One use case: You're trying to fix a big in code. You can create a new node and place under it clones of all relevant code (which may exist across multiple files) for the bug. And not just code but also collateral for tests (e.g. unit test or input files that reproduce the bug etc). Oh and might as well clone the bug report as well.

So all that you need to work with the bug conveniently under one node. Just edit there and all relevant files get updated.

Leo is powerful and has a decent user base. It is the closest thing I've found to Emacs in the Python world. Unfortunately the documentation is really bad and I just don't have time to learn it without good documentation. I toyes with the idea of becoming a master at it just so I can write proper docs but life is too short.

With all respect, leo looks like it is an editor from the 90's with its windows 95-looks. For me, that's mostly a sign that the developers do not adhere to modern development standards. As such, why would I invest time in using a dying product/project?

By that same logic, Vim and Emacs are even more dead than Leo, which they most certainly are not.

Ehh, they actually are very well refined interfaces. True they are text oriented, but that ages well I think.

I'm not trying to imply Leo doesn't have polish, just that native UIs age poorly compared to, say, readline/curses interfaces. The expectations are completely different, and UIs have changed a lot in 20+ years.

It took me maybe 30 seconds of clicking to get to this: https://github.com/leo-editor/leo-editor/graphs/contributors

Doesn't look very dead to me.

With all respect, a lot of design has devolved, and was actually better in the nineties. In my humble and absolutely personal opinion this goes for software UIs, and for cars (exteriors, not technology). Leo is fine. Atom is not (to name a random example, whre not even the technology holds up).

No, I wasn't even young in the nineties. Just youngerish.

You're just making assumptions. Why does a UI have to be trendy to be good? Seems like a big leap to get from the UI to the development method to the health of the project.

That's not far from the truth. Leo has a horrible broken codebase and the devs are not the most competent around. The project is a prime example of everything bad going in software-development.

But, while lacking, they have the right spirit and are constantly trying to do better. If someone can adapt to the myriad of quirks and failures, it can be a very powerful tool. As an outliner it's definitly better than org-mode. But it might be good to have profund python-knowledge to take advantage of the scripting-ability to make it really useful.

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