Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by JasonFruit | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

JasonFruit

The problem I had with Leo was that it tried to be so many things. On another page, their site calls it:

- A fully-featured IDE, with many features inspired by Emacs.

- An outliner. Everything in Leo is an outline.

- A data manager, data manager and personal information manager.

- A powerful scripting environment.

- A tool for organizing and studying computer code.

It claims to be for programmers, authors, and web designers, but I couldn't figure out how to make it good for anything. That may well be my fault, but the experience was frustrating.

View on HN

Emacs pull all that off and then some, but people trying to copy it's success sometimes miss that this versatility depends on two factors:

1. Emacs being an incredibly flexible computing substrate, a well-documented platform for software working with 2D text data as its core abstraction - on top of which all those use cases are supported, through both first-party code and third-party packages.

2. Emacs user base being self-selected to contain people willing to tolerate less than perfectly polished UI, various UX quirks, and who understand this is a hacker's tool, that can and should be modified until it fits the user like a glove.

In other words: this success story takes both more work than it seems, and a specific attitude of the users.

> should be modified until it fits the user like a glove

more like a gauntlet

As an Evil user touching Emacs only for org-mode, this sums it up perfectly.

Emacs-Evil-OrgMode is heavy, uncomfortable, and downright tiresome. But it is powerful, like an iron fist, and for some jobs a powerful iron fist really is the right tool.

I got really into it at one point (circa 2001) but kept running into memory leaks that made it really annoying.

It’s like vim or emacs (or even got :) ) in that it has a logarithmic learning curve: steep up front, but the concepts you learn up front have a lot of leverage later on.

I've been using it for getting on for 20 years. It's not the best editor (I use emacs for some things) and has some quirks, but the joy and simplicity of outlining code so far outweighs all the drawbacks that I still use it as my main editing environment.

In the past I've tried to get to grips with emacs org-mode for the same thing, but Emacs.

And Ed Ream is super-responsive if there are issues

I outline my code, and other documents, by using folding in Vim. Plus plugins for Markdown, LaTeX, and other formats generate tables of contents from headers and sections.

Please suggest a good Markdown plugin for VIM - and why you like it. I've given up on the plugins... I'm now editing Markdown in plain VIM and my newest files are org-mode instead.

I use vim-markdown. It's not perfect, but does what I want. Generates a table of contents in a side window, from there I can jump to any heading by putting the cursor on the item and pressing RETURN. The TOC is indented to show heading level, so it serves as an outline. In the main window there are commands to jump to next or previous heading, sibling, heading of current section. It has concealing for bold, italic, and (this one is important) links. It syntax colors code blocks using the syntax file for the language in the block.

I'm making small changes to it, and actually have my own fork on GitHub with a change that I needed. But the developer doesn't seem to tend to it much.

Thanks, I found your fork here: https://github.com/leephillips/vim-markdown

I'll take a look at it. Tim Pope also has an independent plugin also called vim-markdown, I don't remember what the differences were between your upstream and his.

Looks like (vim legend) Tim Pope’s is the Markdown support included with Vim. My fork is of plasticboy’s, which adds a few features, like the TOC generation, to the default. So far my fork just adds one option that I needed, to only recognize Atx headers.

Not OP, I am using these two https://github.com/masukomi/vim-markdown-folding.git & https://github.com/plasticboy/vim-markdown.git and they work great. I like them because they work fine for me.

Thank you! Why are you using a separate folding plugin, doesn't vim-markdown provide folding? Does it fold better?

I've been using them so long I can't be 100% sure but while they both fold, only one of them preserves the title of the heading while the other folds the whole section. Check the documentation.

I was curious as to what was special about Leo, and it seems to be "outlining".

I'm not clear on what this term means. Can you explain how Leo helps with it, and what it means?

I was thinking the same as you. It seems to be another term for code folding. It is where you collapse parts of a source file into a single line so you can just focus on the part of the source file that you are interested in.

Like org-mode?

It’s more like the literate programming parts of org-mode except Leo is more of a live view, from what I remember.

Outlining in this context means to break up a bigger structure in smaller parts. Like break a document up into each individual paragraph, or sourcecode into functions. Each smaller part is then available to be handled in (semi)programatic ways.

For example, you can link one part to appear on multiple locations of the document. Or you can write a script which filters the parts and rearranges them in your desired structure.

The point of something like leo editor is to have theoretically a unified way to do all that.

From the description it sounds like Org-mode with more coding: both more suited for entering programs (if IDE features indeed mean more than ‘syntax highlighting and regex-substitution’), and for programmatic working with structure. Alas Org is not great on the latter front.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com