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Comment by sharpercoder | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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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