Hi all:
I love outliners, ever since MORE and Maxthink back in the 80's. I am
also a passionate amateur programmer. My favorite tool is Leo. I want
you all to look at it.
http://leo.sourceforge.net/. Free. Open
Source. Cross platform. Python. Author Ed K. Ream is a heck of a nice
guy and apparently, works on this baby 24/7 (!)
When coding, the outliner is invaluable. It's not for everybody -- it's
just my style. Nodes in my outlines can be different files -- I "save"
my work and automagically, a whole set of files is updated. A real
powertool.
I use it as a plaintext outliner. I use it as a "mailmerge" style text
renderer. I don't pretend to understand "Literate programming" in total
(it's a Donald Knuth thing), but this much I get and appreciate -- I can
organize my outline so the code "reads" as if I were explaining it to
you (while Leo takes care of rendering it out so it works). The two
sequences are very different. "Code as literature" -- why not? Write
for human beings and let the machines take care of themselves.
I write and maintain whole websites in Leo. (I pretend it's Zope) :-)
Now my essay on Leo is done. If you try it and any lights come on,
please let me know! If you have any high powered text rendering /
templating tools (anything except XML/XSLT, which I have bounced off 100
times now) please advise!
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