Re: LilyPondTool users on Mac?

[James Bailey]

On Sep 9, 2010, at 8:38 PM, Seth Williamson wrote:

First, I want to thank everybody who is trying to help a noob such as myself with this problem.  You guys are great.

To answer Brett's question, JEdit is 4.3.2.  LilyPondTool is 2.12.894.

Below, I copy a note I sent off-list to another potential savior explaining the latest problem.  If anybody on the list can help me with this and help me get the freaking program going, I would be eternally grateful.

James Bailey said he uses the command line.  James, I assume you can do that in Snow Leopard?  The only reason I've been trying to run LilyPond with JEdit and LilyPondTool is that a friend of mine uses that combination (albeit from a Vista installation), and he loves the way he gets instant feedback on what his code actually looks like.  I'd like to do that if I can.  Do you find that you can get a visual confirmation of what you're doing via the command line frequently enough for what you need?

Actually, until just recently, I used the command line in OSX 10.4, and yes, the feedback was great.

I created a little site with most of what I do (be warned, I haven't looked at it in a long time)

http://sites.google.com/site/nanoforlilypond/

Basically, I use:

screen (which allows me to have multiple virtual windows open simultaneously, like tabs in a web browser, which I can using keyboard commands)

tail -f (which allow me to have a constantly updated console output of any error messages lilypond generates, saved to a file should I need to examine it more closely)

nano (the 2.x branch, because it supports syntax hilighting, bracket matching, regex search-and-replace…)

and Skim.app (because it supports automatic updating of a pdf)

So, I make a change, save the file, switch over to the tab where I have my lilypond file.ly 2> ~/.err.txt command (which runs lilypond on the file, and outputs the console messages lilypond generates to the file ~/.err.txt), then switch over to the tab where I have my tail -f ~/.err.txt (which constantly monitors the lilypond console messages) and check to make sure that I've entered everything correctly, and everything compiles just fine, and once it has, I switch over to Skim.app which has already updated the pdf and I can see the results. It works for me. Possibly because I've adapted to this workflow, but it works really well for me. (When I had a rather boring job, I could even ssh into my computer and work on music on my home computer from my work computer, without the need to install anything on the work computer.)

If you'd like more info about how I got all of this working, let me know, most likely off-list, I doubt this very specific workflow would interest many.

Hope this helps