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Comment by niccl | Hacker News Reader

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

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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?

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.

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.

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.

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