Re: Re: frescobaldi on mac

[Evan Driscoll]

On 08/16/2013 05:00 AM, Christian Andersson wrote:
> I work most efficiently
> with quite large orchestral scores using Lilypond, vi(1), sed(1), Bourne
> shell and GNU make (and a PDF viewer). ... [I]n my
> experience it is quite hard to get MacOS users well accustomed to
> working in the terminal.

Don't forget: it's not just comfort with the terminal, it's also textual
editing of an almost entirely non-textual document (at least the way I
see it).

As someone who is only a very hobbyist musician but *very* comfortable
with the command line and Emacs and compilers and Latex and etc.,
finding out that Frescobaldi has its point-and-click thing and
highlighting of the item under the cursor is what got me to actually
start using Lilypond directly (as opposed to through Denemo).

Even for me, a typical text editor plus the command line and Lilypond
executable is too... intimidating in terms of how long I'm worried it
would take to go from "this note is wrong" to finding the corresponding
point in the source, considering how often that happens. It doesn't seem
to me like searching the document for a particular occurrence of a note
would be nearly as easy & fast as finding the place in a Latex document
that's wrong. With Frescobaldi, I just click on the wrong note and
that's that.

(Of course, Frescabaldi isn't the only thing that supports
point-and-click, probably not even on Macs.)


Actually, if you want to appeal to people like me who are more
interested in "I want to write this quickly" than "I want the output to
look really good", it may be worthwhile to see if there's anything you
can do to draw more attention to the point-and-click feature.

For example, the "Easier Editing" page on lilypond.org describes the
right-hand pane of Frescabaldi as "a built-in PDF viewer" with no
mention of the point-and-click feature. I passed over Frescabaldi in
favor of Denemo for a while in part because I didn't know about that.

The LilyPondTool description on the "Easier Editing" page *does* mention
point-and-click support, but doesn't actually say what point-and-click
*is*. For people like me who are dense (and likely only somewhat
skimming the page), I think you should even say explicitly something
like "It's features include ... an embedded PDF viewer with advanced
point-and-click support that allows you to click notes and other
graphical items in the score and automatically move the cursor to the
corresponding source location."

(I had good experiences with Denemo too, but switched to "raw" Lilypond
using Frescabaldi for... well, reasons.)

Evan

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