.. @+leo-ver=5-thin
.. @+node:ekr.20131008041326.16078: * @file preliminaries.txt
.. @@language rest
.. @@tabwidth -4
.. @+all
.. @+node:ekr.20131008041326.16079: ** @rst html/preliminaries.html
#############
Preliminaries
#############

.. contents::
    :depth: 2
.. @+node:ekr.20040414172218.4: *3* Acknowledgements
Leo owes much of its visual design to MORE, possibly the most elegant
computer program ever written. Leo's clone nodes are inspired by MORE.

The following people have made generous donations to the Leo project:
Robert Low, Nic Cave-Lynch.

The following people reported bugs, answered questions, and made suggestions for
improving Leo:
Alex Abacus, Shakeeb Alireze, Steve Allen, Bruce Arnold,
Chris Barker, Dennis Benzinger, David Boddie, Jason Breti, Eric Brown, Terry Brown,
Darius Clarke, Martin Clifford, Jason Cunliffe,
Josef Dalcolmo, Gil Dev, Bill Drissel, Wenshan Du,
Allen Edwards, Chris Elliot, Dethe Elza, Mark Engleberg, Roger Erens, 
Stephen Ferg, Tom Fetherston, Tomaz Ficko, Niklas Frykholm,
Fred Gansevles, Jonathan M. Gilligan, Zak Greant, Thomas Guettler, Romain Guy,
Dave Hein, Tiago Castro Henriques, Gary Herron, Steve Holden, Klass Holwerda, Matthias Huening, Robert Hustead,
John Jacob, Paul Jaros, Christopher P. Jobling, Eric S. Johansson, Garold Johnson, 
James Kerwin,
Nicola Larosa, David LeBlanc, Chris Liechti, Steve Litt, Martin v. Löwis (Loewis), Robert Low, Fredrik Lundh,
Michael Manti, Alex Martelli, Marcus A. Martin, Gidion May, David McNab, Frank Merenda, Martin Montcrieffe, Will Munslow,
Chad Netzer, Derick van Niekerk, Jeff Nowland,
Naud Olivier, Joe Orr,
Marc-Antoine Parent, Paul Paterson, Sean Shaleh Perry, Tim Peters, David Priest, Gary Poster, Scott Powell,
Bruce Rafnel, Walter H. Rauser, Olivier Ravard, David Speed Ream, Rich Ries, Aharon Robbins, Guido van Rossum, David Rowe,
Davide Salomoni, Steven Schaefer,Johannes Schöön, Wolfram Schwenzer, Casey Wong Kam Shun,
Gil Shwartz, Jim Sizelove, Paul Snively, Jurjen Stellingwerff, Phil Straus, David Szent-Györgyi,
Kent Tenney, Jeffrey Thompson,
Gabriel Valiente, Jim Vickroy, Tony Vignaux, Tom van Vleck,
Kevin Walzer, Ying-Chao Wang, Cliff Wells, Dan Wharton, John Wiegley, Wim Wijnders, Dan Winkler, 
Vadim Zeitlin.

The following have contributed plugins to Leo:

Rodrigo Benenson, Pierre Bidon, Felix Breuer, Terry Brown,
Mike Crowe,
Josef Dalcolmo, Michael Dawson,
e, Roger Erens, 
Andrea Galimberti, Engelbert Gruber,
Timo Honkasalo,
Jaakko Kourula, Maxim Krikun,
Zhang Le, LeoUser,
Frédéric Momméja, Bernhard Mulder, 
Mark Ng,
Alexis Gendron Paquette, Paul Paterson,
Dan Rahmel,
Davide Salomoni,
Ed Taekema, Kent Tenney, Brian Theado,
Ville M. Vainio,
Steve Zatz.
.. @+node:ekr.20040416080538: *4* @rst-no-head special mentions
The following deserve special mention:
David Brock wrote TSyntaxMemo.
The late Bob Fitzwater kept me focused on design.
Donald Knuth invented the CWEB language.
Jonathan M. Gilligan showed how to put the Leo icon in Leo's windows.
Joe Orr created XSLT stylesheets for Leo; see http://www.jserv.com/jk_orr/xml/leo.htm.
Joe Orr also created an outstanding set of tutorials for Leo; see http://www.evisa.com/e/sb.htm.
LeoUser (B.H.) contributed numerous plugins and was the inspiration for Leo's minibuffer.
LeoUser also wrote jyLeo: Leo for Jython.
The late Bernhard Mulder proposed a new way of untangling external files.
John K. Ousterhout created tcl/Tk. Neal Norwitz wrote PyChecker.
Marc-Antoine Parent urged me to use XML for Leo's file format and helped improve it.
Paul Paterson suggested the plugin architecture,
suggested an approach to spell checking and has contributed many excellent plugins.
François Pinard wrote pymacs.
Norman Ramsey created noweb and gave permission to quote from the noweb web documentation.
Rich Ries has contributed a huge number of suggestions.
Steven P. Schaefer pointed out major security problems lurking in hooks.
Gil Shwartz helped with unicode support.
Phil Straus has been a great friend and constant support.
Guido van Rossum created Python, Tkinter and the Python License.
Dave Winer created MORE.
Ville M. Vainio created ILeo and has made many other valuable contributions to Leo.
Dan Winkler helped support Leo on the Mac.

Special thanks to my family.
My brother, David Speed Ream, tested Leo and made many useful suggestions.
Rebecca, James and Linda make it all worthwhile.
It was during a conversation with Rebecca that I realized that MORE could be used as a prototype for Leo.
That was a crucial first step.
.. @+node:ekr.20090221070927.1: *3* Leo's MIT License
All parts of Leo are distributed under the following copyright. This is intended
to be the same as the MIT license, namely that Leo is absolutely free, even for
commercial use, including resale. There is no GNU-like "copyleft" restriction.
This license is compatible with the GPL.

**Copyright 1997-2013 by Edward K. Ream. All Rights Reserved.**

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of
this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in
the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to
use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of
the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so,
subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

**THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR
COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER
IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN
CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.**
.. @+node:ekr.20050831184021.4: *3* What people are saying about Leo
.. @+node:ekr.20050830074815.1: *4* Leo is revolutionary
"I am using Leo since a few weeks and I brim over with enthusiasm for it. I
think it is the most amazing software since the invention of the spreadsheet."

"We who use Leo know that it is a breakthrough tool and a whole new way of
writing code." -- Joe Orr

"I am a huge fan of Leo. I think it's quite possibly the most revolutionary
programming tool I have ever used and it (along with the Python language) has
utterly changed my view of programming (indeed of writing) forever." -- Shakeeb
Alireza

"Thank you very much for Leo. I think my way of working with data will change
forever... I am certain [Leo] will be a revolution. The revolution is as
important as the change from sequential linear organization of a book into a
web-like hyperlinked pages. The main concept that impress me is that the source
listing isn't the main focus any more. You focus on the non-linear,
hierarchical, collapsible outline of the source code." -- Korakot Chaovavanich

"Leo is a quantum leap for me in terms of how many projects I can manage and how
much information I can find and organize and store in a useful way." -- Dan
Winkler

"Wow, wow, and wow...I finally understand how to use clones and I realized that
this is exactly how I want to organize my information. Multiple views on my
data, fully interlinkable just like my thoughts." -- Anon

"Edward... you've come up with perhaps the most powerful new concept in code
manipulation since VI and Emacs. -- David McNab

"Leo is...a revolutionary step in the right direction for programming." -- Brian
Takita
.. @+node:ekr.20050830074815.2: *4* Leo is a showcase Python application
"Thanks for a wonderful program – everybody should be using it! It blows the
socks off that Java Mind mapping software that won project of the month a while
back on sourceforge!" -- Derick van Niekerk.

"A few years back I would have said Zope was #1 Python showcase, but I agree
100% that Leo is tops now." -- Jason Cunliffe

"Leo is the most interesting Python project I know of...I see lots of stuff
posted on the Daily Python page, but I usually yawn and come over to this forum
to see what's cooking." -- Anon

..  "Leo is the best Tkinter application ever written. It convinces me that Tkinter
..  can really *do something*, and do [it] well." - Anon

"What an original synthesis of different ideas, why can't other Open Source
projects change the way I think?" -- Anon
.. @+node:ekr.20050830074815.3: *4* Leo is fun, even addicting
"When first I opened Leo, it was out of curiosity. But having used it...I'll
never go back. They'll have to pry Leo out of my cold, dead fingers! Seriously,
it should be renamed 'Crack Cocaine' because it's that addictive. I'm ready to
start a 12-Step group." -- Travers A. Hough

"I feel addicted to programming again...in fact [Leo] has resurrected a dead
project of mine :) The Outline has proven most liberating in terms of testing
ideas out." -- Anon

"I have been absolutely seduced by Leo over the past few days. I tell you, I can
not put it down. I feel like a kid with a shiny new bike...I'm already bursting
with new ways I'd like to use the tool in the future." -- Lyn Adams Headley

Thanks for the great work--I love Leo!!! -- Josef Dalcolmo

Leo has simplified updating and creating new scripts and .bats keeping similar
information in the same place. there is almost an addictive withdrawal effect
when I can complete an operation in so much less time with Leo & python than I
had become used to. -- Anon
.. @+node:ekr.20050830074815.4: *4* Leo is a flexible, powerful IDE
"[Leo] should either replace or greatly augment the development tools that I
use." -- Zak Greant

"Leo is a marriage of outlining and programming. Pure genius. The main reason I
am impressed with this tool is that it doesn't affect your choice of tools. You
can use whatever IDE for whatever language and switch back and forth between Leo
and it." -- Austin King

"Leo is the best IDE that I have had the pleasure to use. I have been using it
now for about 2--3 months. It has totally changed not only the way that I
program, but also the way that I store and organize all of the information that
I need for the job that I do." -- Ian Mulvany

"I only have one week of Leo experience but I already know it will be my default
IDE/project manager...people complain about the lack of a project manager for
the free/standard Python IDE's like Idle. Leo clearly solves that problem and in
a way that commercial tools can't touch." -- Marshall Parsons

"I have been using Leo for about 3 weeks and I hardly use my other programming
editor anymore...I find it easy and enjoyable to use. I plan to adopt it as my
presentation tool for code reviews." -- Jim Vickroy

"I'm absolutely astounded by the power of such a simple idea! It works great and
I can immediately see the benefits of using Leo in place of the standard flat
file editor." -- Tom Lee

I think you're really showing what open source can do and your current
trajectory puts you on track to kick Emacs into the dustbin of computing
history. -- Dan Winkler
.. @+node:ekr.20050830074815.5: *4* Leo is a superb outliner
"Word outlines are very useful. But Leo makes Word look like a clunky toy."
--Joe Orr

"Leo is an interactive editor for organizing text fragments hierarchically and
sequentially into one or more files and hierarchical folders, without arbitrary
limits on the number and size of text fragments and the depth of the
hierarchy...Leo is a tool for combining hierarchically and sequentially
organized text fragments into text files, hierarchically grouped into folders,
with hierarchical or sequential organization of text within the files, and
without arbitrary limits on the size and number of files and the depth of the
hierarchy of folders and text nesting within the files." -- Alex Abacus

"Leo reminds me a great deal of things I loved when I used Userland's Frontier
(an outlining cms with a native oodb) - but Frontier wasn't hackable enough for
me, and it wasn't oriented towards coding..., and you couldn't round-trip
rendered pages (big Leo win). This is really a super tool - in a matter of days
I've started to use it on all my projects and I still haven't figured out how I
lived without it." -- John Sequeira

"Leo is EXACTLY the kind of outliner I was looking for--fantastic job!"
-- Steve Allen

"If you are like me, you have a kind of knowledge base with infos gathered over
time. And you have projects, where you use some of those infos. Now, with
conventional outliners you begin to double these infos, because you want to have
the infos needed for the project with your project. With Leo you can do this
too, but if you change text in one place IT IS UPDATED IN THE OTHER PLACE TOO!
This is a feature I did not see with any other outliner (and I tried a few).
Amazing! Leo directly supports the way I work!" -- F. Geiger
.. @+node:ekr.20050830074815.6: *4* Leo is an excellent PIM
"Another day, another breakthrough using Leo--now I realize Leo is the best URL
bookmark manager there is. No more bookmarks menus or favorites lists inside the
browser for me. With the @url directive I can just double click on the URL to
open it in my browser. Leo lets me arrange the URLs in a hierarchy (or multiple
hierarchies), attach notes to them, save clippings of things I read on the
sites. It's sooo much better than anything the browsers have built in and it
lets me easily use different browsers on different platforms and different
machines (try that with the browsers' built-in bookmark managers)." -- Dan
Winkler

"I am an amateur photographer. I use plain old 35mm. film for my pictures. Over
the weekend, I used Leo to organize my lists of pictures. It is quite helpful--I
can have separate nodes for pictures I have enlarged, as well as pictures I have
submitted to our local camera club. Thanks!" -- Rich Reis

"Cloning is pure genius!... Leo's cloning facility, allows me to create several
views on the CFA course material. My main view follows the prescribed study
guide. Another view is organized like the textbooks. Yet another gives me a
glossary of terms. And when I'm done, I'll have some nice libraries...I can
re-use later in other projects." -- Michael Manti
.. @+node:ekr.20050830074815.8: *4* Leo is a superb documentation tool
"I've written documentation in WordPerfert, Ventura, Word, PageMaker, and
FrameMaker and even though they create wonderfully looking and useful documents,
they've never been able to do what I've been looking for. HTML, compiled help
files, and later PDF came closer, but still not there...I think I've found it in
LEO, a way to make a "living" document. A document built out of discrete parts
that can be re-organized on the fly to meet the needs of a varying
audience...I've already started converting the IT Procedures manual from Open
Office to LEO because I know it's going to be much more useful to me and anyone
else...just the possibility of keeping system maintenance scripts in the IT
manual is mind boggling." -- David Nichols

"With the help of the rst2 plugin, [Leo is] the best outliner I have yet
encountered for writing the early stages of academic papers."

"A Leo file is an ideal documentation tool, collecting the assorted readme.txt
files, the comments from the source files...as well as the config files
themselves." -- Kent Tenney
.. @+node:ekr.20050830074815.9: *4* Leo simplifies the understanding of complex systems
"Just as structured programming reveals and disciplines the flow control of a
program, [Leo] allows the designer to reveal and discipline structure at many
layers simultaneously: data structures, object structure, entity-relationship
structure, client-server structure, design pattern structure, temporal
structure, project management structure, and any other structure relevant to the
system." -- Steven P. Schaefer

"A funny observation with Leo is that when I 'Leo-ise' other people's code, Leo
makes the code's structure so transparent that design faults become very quickly
apparent. For example, maintenance pain caused by lack of factorization." --
David McNab

"Leo is a powerful tool for organizing text into tree structures, and for just
generally attacking a number of problems from a tree-based perspective." -- Joe
Orr

"I found this blog entry by someone (a talented former coworker of mine
actually) complaining about some poorly written code she had to maintain:
http://snippy.ceejbot.com/wiki/show/start/2003/01/29/001 She said: 'You'd need a
bulldozer to start refactoring it.' That was my cue to write a long message
explaining that there is indeed such a bulldozer and it's called Leo. (You can
see my message there as a reply to her original posting.) I gave her my recipe
for how to get someone else's messy, scary code into Leo and how to break it
down into manageable chunks." -- Dan Winkler

"Ed, you continue to push the envelope. The amazing thing is that the footprint
isn't doubling every few months like it would be in another designer's hands.
Adding features by removing constraints, hot refactoring while adding unit
tests. Forget the book. I would pay to see the movie."
.. @+node:ekr.20050830074815.10: *4* Leo is stable, well designed and well supported
"I am extremely impressed at how stable and useful Leo appears to be." -- Marcus
A. Martin

"Leo is amazingly stable. Docs are often weak with Open Source Software. Not so
Leo: Leo is unusually well documented." -- F. Geiger

"Leo is unimaginably useful and I always find new things it already knows(!) how
to do. Indeed I am amazed by the never-ending resources and patience Edward is
putting into it and its users community. Excellent." -- Gil Shwartz

I feel strongly that Ed Ream, our ever-patient, ever-productive Leo architect
deserves a nomination [for the ActiveState OpenSource Award.] Among other
reasons, for:

- Delivering the first usable visual literate programming tool.
- Adding a vast abundance of new features.
- Making possible a previously unimaginable amount of leverage in code editing.
- Eliminating vast amounts of menial programming labour.
- Tirelessly and patiently supporting users, and catering to a wide range of
  feature requests. -- David McNab

.. @+node:ekr.20050830074815.11: *4* Longer quotes...
.. @+node:ekr.20050830074815.12: *5*  Speed Ream's slashdot article
September 3, 2002

Hello, my full name is David Speed Ream. I am known as Speed to friends and
enemies alike, but I gladly answer to David or most any other handle. I am an
unabashed and biased fan of Leo, the fact that it was written by my brother
Edward only slightly coloring my already colored glasses. I have been testing
and using Leo in software production for over 4 years. My company currently has
over 50,000 lines of code in over 100 source files that are written using Leo.

My comments are from two points of view, the first being software project
manager for a complicated, multi-module software product, and the second being
as a production line coder. For me, Leo’s greatest and only real drawback is the
learning curve. This learning curve can be shallow is if all that is required is
that someone code using Leo. However, in our company we allocate 40 to 80 hours
*on top* of the normal coding load for someone to come up to speed on Leo. The
ROI (return on investment) is calculated by me to be on the order of 3 months.
So if I hire a consultant for less than 3 months, I don’t teach him Leo, even
though all source code in our company must reside in Leo files for the reasons I
won’t go into now.

I consider that my coders are 15 to 30 percent more efficient in their daily
operations than my competition’s people. This indefensible claim of mine is
based on the changes in my productivity as Leo grew from a test document
production tool to the primary production method for all our assembly, c and cpp
source code.

Personally, I hate to deal with documentation when I write code, except:

1) When I am first sitting down to solve a new problem.
   Then the documentation becomes quite long-winded and pontificatory,
   as if I were the only one on earth smart enough to solve the problem - or
2) When I come back to code I or someone else has written and find the documentation insufficient to
   understand the code without study (seems to be most of the time).

So I do not require my engineers or myself to do a great job of documentation,
nor do I use Leo for that purpose. Rather, it is Leo’s outlining and organizing
ability, and Leo’s ability to create source files from within the outline that
give me what I think is a tremendous competitive advantage. Each of my company’s
products run on all versions of windows from Win 3.1 to XP. In our flagship
software piece, there are ten main modules, and each module is maintained by one
single Leo file. In the CODEC module, one Leo file named compress.leo organizes
and creates seven .asm files, forty-four .c files, twenty .h files, two .def
files, four .mak files, etc. etc. etc. This one file can be checked out from
source code control and given to an engineer for the addition of a new feature.

In it are contained all the known issues for the CODEC, each issue arranged in
its own clone section. One clone section groups together every routine, variable
or type definition that must change between different versions of Windows. These
sections could be from six different c source files, two assembly files, and
eight .h files. Another clone section groups together those sections relating to
memory problems, which change according to the memory configuration and TSR
configuration (or lack thereof) on the target machine. Another clone section
groups sections that fail (or don’t fail) if the routine in question was
accidentally run during the dreaded ‘interrupt time’. Another clone section is a
section containing clones, each of which is named after the major bug that was
fixed when the engineer who fixed the bug grouped a bunch of routines,
definitions, etc. together to fix the bug.

None of the above clone sections was ‘designed’ into the document. Just the
opposite happens. When the codec was first written, there was just a single Leo
file with a bunch of sections for each c routine or assembly module. As the
product grew and was tested on various platforms, each failure of the module was
organized into clones each time a failure was fixed. This is what I call “SELF
DOCUMENTING CODE”. This has nothing to do with me sitting and documenting
anything. Its just that the STRUCTURE of a bug fix (or product enhancement)
lives on long after the coding is done, as long as no one is foolish enough to
delete the cloned sections that ‘DOCUMENT’ what happened.

In actual practice, this organizational ‘history’ is so powerful that I can’t
begin to describe it. A ‘REVERSE LEARNING CURVE’ happens when an engineer gets a
Leo file that already has the ‘interrupt time sensitive’ routines grouped
together by the last unfortunate soul who had to work on them. There may not be
any more written documentation, but the knowledge contained in the structure can
be breathtaking. It is certainly time saving. I find this particularly true in
my own case. Often I’ll look at some code that seems totally unfamiliar and
think ‘what idiot wrote this crap’. Then I’ll look at the version control
comments and realize that I wrote the crap. Then for sure I know the
documentation is non-existent, but the clones I used to develop it are still
there, and they always serve to refresh my memory in an indescribable way.

Enough of this commentary, I just looked at the clock. Best wishes to anyone
willing to try Leo for a week. I hope you will be glad you did.
.. @+node:ekr.20050830074815.13: *5* Joe Orr
The Word outlines are very useful. But Leo makes Word look like a clunky toy.

#1 Reason would probably be clone nodes. One node can point to another. Another
way of putting this is is that a leaf can be on more than one tree. For
example, suppose you have a list of recipes. You simultaneously put a single
recipe under multiple categories or even multiple hierarchies. You could put "3
bean enchilada" simultaneously under Recipes-Mexican and Food-Gas. Another
example would be, if you are a biologist trying to decide under which genus to
put a new species, you could put the species under two simultaneously. In
effect, you can build a 3-D tree. For a further illustration see
http://www.3dtree.com/ev/e/sbooks/leo/sbframetoc_ie.htm

#2 Reason would probably be that Leo outlines can be embedded in external text
files. So, a Leo outline is more than an outline, it is a meta-structure that
can be added to another text without changing that text, but rather providing
an external road map to the text. Microsoft Word has a text (xml) version with a
commenting convention, so Leo can even be used to add outlines into Word docs,
although it isn't set up to do that now. For example, see
http://www.3dtree.com/ev/e/sbooks/leo/sbframetoc_ie.htm In this case, the upper
window of Leo is the meta-structure, and the bottom window is the file to which
the meta-structure is being applied, viewed one node at a time.

I may not have made #2 very clear, but it is actually a very useful feature. It
takes some getting used to before one sees all of the possibilities tho. One
way to think of it is that Leo allows you to throw external documents into your
outline, and yet the external document remains independent and can still be
edited separately.

Some other cool things about Leo which Word doesn't feature:
1. Pure xml output that is easy to transform into other formats (next
version of Word will have true XML format, but not as easy to work with).
One consequence of this is that Leo files can be transformed pretty easily
to web pages with their outlining capability intact.
2. Easy to add features since is programmed in Python and open source. Maybe
your average user can't start hacking on it, but a surprising amount can be
tacked on...
.. by flipping through the Tk manual.
3. Free, opensource, multi-platform
4. Leo is scriptable with Python. It should be possible to build a Tickler
into Leo using Python scripting, for example.
.. @+node:ekr.20050830074815.14: *5* Dan Winkler
First of all, kudos to you for the excellent progress you've been making with
Leo. I upgraded today after about three months of using and older version and I
was thrilled to see all the great improvements that have happened so fast. I
especially love the ability to go to next clone. I think you're really showing
what open source can do and your current trajectory puts you on track to kick
Emacs into the dustbin of computing history.

So today I copied all my data (personal information manager and project
management stuff) out of my old outliner (ThoughtManager, which syncs with and
runs on the Palm) and put it into Leo. It took me hours to do it and then to
rearrange it the way I really wanted it. But having the ability to make clones
and have different ways to view my data is, as you know, fabulous. In my case,
for personal information and project management things, I used the flexibility
of clones to allow me to see my data in several different views: 1) by project,
the logical hierarchical breakdown by topic, 2) by person, so whenever I'm
talking to someone I can easily see all the pending items related to them which
may be spread over multiple projects, 3) by priority, so I can see what needs to
get done sooner and what can wait for later and, 4) a special case of priority
called "Today" for the things I'm going to focus on in the coming hours.

Now here's why I don't miss the ability of my old outliner to synch the entire
outline with the Palm. It turns out the main thing I really want in the Palm is
the top category "Today" so all I have to do is have Leo flatten that one
heading into a text file (and it kindly remembers the name and directory of the
file I used last time) and then I'm done because I've told the Palm Hotsync
manager that that file should be sent to Palm memo pad every time I synch. The
Palm Hotsync manager does a nice job of sending a text file to the Palm memo pad
and even breaks the file up into multiple memo records if it's too big to fit in
just one. So that gives me enough to be able to browse (or full text search) the
small amount of data that I really want right inside my Palm (which is also my
cell phone). Quick and dirty but it works.

For times when I want my whole outline with me, Leo wins again because thanks to
its cross platform nature I can take my whole outline with me on my Mac iBook,
even though I usually edit it on a Windows PC (which is the only kind of machine
my old outliner would run on). Quite frankly, although my old outliner was able
to shoehorn the whole thing into my palm/cellphone, it was a pain to access it
on the small screen and slow processor. Now when I anticipate I'll need the
whole thing, for example when I'm going to a meeting, I can put it on my Mac
iBook (under X and Fink for now until Python can do it native under Aqua) and
have real, full access to it all.

I think now in addition to being great for programming Leo is also a great PIM.
Being able to flatten a strategically chosen portion of the outline into a known
file name that the Palm synch manager has been told to send to the Palm on every
synch does the trick for me. I wonder if you would consider something like an
@flatten directive so I can have that done automatically for me every time I
save my outline? For now it's up to me to flatten the node I want manually,
although once I've done that the transfer to the Palm is automatic.

You're my hero! Thank you so much.
.. @+node:ekr.20050830074815.15: *5* Dan Winkler 2
Another day, another breakthrough using Leo -- now I realize Leo is the 
best URL bookmark manager there is.  No more bookmarks menus or 
favorites lists inside the browser for me.  With the @url directive I 
can just double click on the URL to open it in my browser.  Leo lets me 
arrange the URLs in a hierarchy (or multiple hierarchies), attach notes 
to them, save clippings of things I read on the sites.  It's sooo much 
better than anything the browsers have built in and it lets me easily 
use different browsers on different platforms and different machines 
(try that with the browsers' built-in bookmark managers).  

When using Leo as a project manager and personal information manager as 
I do I can heavily annotate every task and project with helpful and 
relevant URLs.  And since URLs can be of the file:// form, they're not 
just for web pages or HTML documents;  I can link to any file on my disk 
of any type to be opened by any program.

Leo is a quantum leap for me in terms of how many projects I can manage 
and how much information I can find and organize and store in a useful 
way.  I'm a data-mining army of one now and the web is my playground. 
Every time I find a web page that has interesting links to others, 
those links get stored in my Leo outline too, right where I can find 
them and make practical use of them.  I can easily accept dozens of 
valuable links every day and integrate them into what I'm doing in a way 
that I'm confidant they won't get lost or forgotten.  Before I always 
used to get bogged down by the difficulty of managing bookmarks inside 
the browser.  But now I'm no longer the victim of information overload 
buried in the knowledge landslide of the Internet;  instead I'm the 
professional strip miner with the world's biggest bulldozer.  I eagerly 
plunge into mountains of data and emerge with all the valuable 
information nuggets neatly stored and organized.  And my storehouse of 
knowledge is a flexible thing where I can reorganize and prioritize and 
massage the data to my heart's content as I learn more about it and 
decide to use it in different ways for different purposes.  It's the 
difference between the pick axe and the steam shovel for me.
.. @+node:ekr.20050830074815.16: *5* Dan Winkler 3
This year my accountant is getting a beautiful printout generated by LaTeX and
Leo. I have a complicated tax situation this year, but I got it all laid out and
organized in Leo. Then I had each of the nodes that had something my accountant
needs to see write the data out to a file in the form a LaTeX table.

Sometimes a row of a table would have a result that was calculated by adding up
a list of numbers. For that I used the modern day equivalent of an adding
machine paper tape -- I stored a lisp s-expression in a Leo comment. I like
s-expressions for this because once I put the opening "(+" on one line and the
closing ")" on another line, I can fill in additional numbers just by typing
them and can even annotate them with comments. So in the middle of generating a
LaTeX file I might have something like this::

    @
    (+
    1165.26 1823.70 ; May 2002
    123.38 ; June 2002
    13.50 ; July 2002
    13.21 ; October 2002
    55.25 ; November 2002
    )
    @c

That's an annotated record of how I arrived at the number the accountant will
actually see. I can just paste it into any lisp or scheme interpreter and get
the total. Adding additional numbers is easy.

For next year, I think I might take this a step further. What I did this year is
good for adding up numbers to get a total for one row of a LaTeX table. But it
turns out I'd also like some more processing done on those tables (which I had
to do by hand this time) -- I'd like the rows sorted in reverse order by
magnitude (so that the big numbers jump out at you from the start of the tables)
and I'd like a total of all the rows in the table. So I think next year, instead
of having an s-expression that computes the total of one row for me, I think
I'll use s-expressions that generate whole tables, formatted for LaTex, from the
underlying data. So I'm thinking next year my s-expressions might look more like
this::

    @
    (table "Widget Related Expenses"
        ("widget insurance" (+
                        1165.26 1823.70 ; May 2002
                        123.38 ; June 2002
                        13.50 ; July 2002
                        13.21 ; October 2002
                        55.25 ; November 2002
                      ))
         ("widget shipping" (+
                        472.15 651.94 ; May 2002
                        54 ; June 2002
                       ))
         ("widget cleaning" (+
                        165.26 183.70 ; May 2002
                        123.38 ; June 2002
                        13.50 ; July 2002
                        13.21 ; October 2002
                        55.25 ; November 2002
                       ))
    )
    @c

The job of that "table" function would be to return the LaTeX code needed to
display a table with the category names and values, sorted descending by
magnitude, with the total displayed. It's sort of a poor man's way of doing a
spreadsheet inside Leo and then making it look great using LaTeX. The idea would
be as I wanted to add more data, I'd add it to the s-expression and then
reevaluate the whole thing by pasting it into a lisp interpreter and then
copying the result back into the same Leo node for LaTeX to process.

-- Dan
.. @-all
.. @-leo
