It’s been probably ten years since I last used Leo. At the time, it was a slightly alien but largely enjoyable experience, but I ended up moving back to emacs. I seem to recall it not playing terribly well with others – if you’re on a team, you either all had to be using Leo, or non-Leoers had to handle a great deal of additional markup in the text files that didn’t make sense out of context.
I’m curious about other people’s experience with it, and whether that situation has improved in the intervening time.
We used it heavily to retain sanity while working on large JS apps when there was no notion of Require.js or Browserify. It allowed us to neatly split the file into components that made sense, while avoiding the need to use a bunch of <script> tags and keep track of dependencies. Obviously it wasn’t too pretty when non-Leo users had to edit the file, but they seemed to manage quite well – the additional markup wasn’t too intrusive and the code formatting was preserved.
I also went on to use other editors (Vim and LightTable), but I distinctly remember being really impressed with the number of features and options in that “little” thing – after reading the docs for the first time, I realized we were using a relatively small subset of its capabilities. First thing that comes to mind is the fact that you could selectively export certain outlines from a file into separate files, which in retrospect sounds really powerful.
Even though there are far better options for modularity of web apps these days, I still want to go back and try it again for a personal project because (very anecdotal stuff ahead) I think the outlines really helped me focus on one piece of code at a time, which might have resulted in better architecture.
It’s been probably ten years since I last used Leo. At the time, it was a slightly alien but largely enjoyable experience, but I ended up moving back to emacs. I seem to recall it not playing terribly well with others – if you’re on a team, you either all had to be using Leo, or non-Leoers had to handle a great deal of additional markup in the text files that didn’t make sense out of context.
I’m curious about other people’s experience with it, and whether that situation has improved in the intervening time.
I’m really glad this has been posted! :)
We used it heavily to retain sanity while working on large JS apps when there was no notion of Require.js or Browserify. It allowed us to neatly split the file into components that made sense, while avoiding the need to use a bunch of <script> tags and keep track of dependencies. Obviously it wasn’t too pretty when non-Leo users had to edit the file, but they seemed to manage quite well – the additional markup wasn’t too intrusive and the code formatting was preserved.
I also went on to use other editors (Vim and LightTable), but I distinctly remember being really impressed with the number of features and options in that “little” thing – after reading the docs for the first time, I realized we were using a relatively small subset of its capabilities. First thing that comes to mind is the fact that you could selectively export certain outlines from a file into separate files, which in retrospect sounds really powerful.
Even though there are far better options for modularity of web apps these days, I still want to go back and try it again for a personal project because (very anecdotal stuff ahead) I think the outlines really helped me focus on one piece of code at a time, which might have resulted in better architecture.