Why Leointeg? More explanation For Both Ends

[tbpassin]

Now that leointeg is nearly out of beta. I think that a real effort is needed to help people get a good sense of why they should spend the time to get familiar with it. I haven't seen this addressed enough. Please note that I am NOT deprecating the work itself, not at all. The work has been brilliant.

I am talking about two points of view.

1. Why should an experienced Leo user start using leointeg? For myself, I feel somewhat crippled when I use it, mostly because I can't assign key bindings to some of my commands. Yes, buttons help, but there are only so many buttons you can use, and a hotkey is much better for some commands that get used frequently. I also feel the lack of some plugins, like VR3 and Freewin. BTW, vsc has extensions that render RsT or Markdown in a side pane. I don't think they can be used in leointeg mode, can they? That's one of the kind of questions that need answering, I think.

   How can I use the strengths of vsc in leointeg? As a new vsc user, I hardly know what they are, but I would expect things like using vsc's debugging, code assist, etc. tools while I am working in leointeg. How can I do that?

2. Why should an experienced vsc user start using leointeg? This is much the same as the question of why use Leo instead of any conventional editor. It's darn hard to explain, and many of the abilities I have come to depend on only show their value after a period of use.

   At first glance, it's not at all obvious that Leo offers anything that other editors do not, and it's harder to learn. The most visible part is the outline view. Most editors/IDEs offer a tree view, so Leo doesn't look different in that way ... until you've been using it for a while.

I think that we should have something compelling for both types of users by the time leointeg goes public with V1.0. Maybe a good FAQ would do the job.

[kghenderson]

I think there's room for a glide-path here. I've made some very large & complex Leo outlines in the past, although they certainly pale in comparison to the work Tom & others have done. Phase 1 for me is just using it as a basic 2-pane outliner as a preferred way of taking informal notes and tracking tasks. This plugin does have some amazing potential - like as you said Tom, using the Markdown pane with mermaid.js and other plugins to preview the whole doc, even though you're working in snippets. This has always been a major pain point for me when working in Leo/VR3 (maybe that's changed though, I'm only recently returned to it). I think that syncing to the right section of the document though is going to be important so we don't need to scroll for long documents.