On Sun, 26 Jun 2022 at 13:29, Robert Weiner <r...@gnu.org> wrote: > Hi Eduardo: > > I really think that you are confused in saying that Hyperbole and Org are > hacker-unfriendly. Yes, they are targeted at users who don't have to > understand the programming, but if you do understand Lisp programming well, > the interactive features are available as Lisp functions in almost all cases, > so you simply have to dive in, find the functions you want and utilize or > change them. > > In fact, Hyperbole offers 'action implicit buttons' that utilize > angle-bracket syntax to turn any Lisp function (or hyperbole button type call > or variable reference) into a hyperbutton that runs the function with > arguments or displays the variable, e.g. <find-file > "~/.org/my-org-file.org">. > > With Hyperbole, much of the behavior is factored into class-like libraries > with the 'methods' alphabetized and separated into public and private > groupings. Now some of this code is complex in order to handle many contexts > and make things simple to the user but that is a matter of you understanding > this complexity if you want to hack on it. > > I'm not sure what else you could ask for in packages.
Hi Robert, let me see if I can find something useful to say... Most of the people that I know who became active users of eev were "beginner programmers" when they started using eev - by "beginner programmers" I mean that their mental buffers were still quite small, and they couldn't understand well functions that were more than a few lines long. I wanted to make eev more accessible to people like them, and I treated their feedback very seriously. One of the techniques that I used to make eev more accessible to them is described in this video, http://angg.twu.net/find-elisp-intro.html (find-1stclassvideo-links "2022findelispintro") (find-2022findelispintrovideo "14:36") from 14:36 onwards - "put several similar examples close to one another, starting by the most basic ones". I treated that technique as "obvious" for many years - I just used it in many places, and I thought that the users would notice that pattern, and start to use it in their own notes. That didn't work, and I saw that I had to spell out that technique explicitly, and repeat it often. When I asked you questions about how to create eev-style sexps that would behave as hyperbole-style buttons, in some of the e-mails that I point to here, http://angg.twu.net/hyperbole.html I was signaling that my mental buffers were almost full... at that point explanations in English helped me very little, and I was trying to write "several similar examples close to one another, starting by the most basic ones" to factor your code conceptually via tests. I _still_ think that your buttons and menus are hacker-unfriendly. The source code is available, yes, but I spent several evenings trying to understand them in my "non-user" way, and I got a mental buffer overflow instead of enlightenment... and I also spent many hours writing e-mails to the Hyperbole mailing list, but the answers left me very frustrated. Hope that helps, =/ Eduardo Ochs http://angg.twu.net/#eev
