Re: Any cool uses of Lentic?

[Phillip Lord]

"Tory S. Anderson" <torys.anderson@gmail.com> writes:

> Looking at Lentic[1] it seems like something that has been thought out and
> well developed,

Thank you!

> but I feel I'm missing awesomeness that I know must be there. How is
> it more than only a shortcut for indirect buffers?
>
> Footnotes: [1]  https://github.com/phillord/lentic

The main problem with indirect buffers is that the two buffers share
exactly the same text (in the context of Emacs this also means text
properties which is why they tend to break for multi-modal usage, for
example).

Lentic allows you have text with any relationship you want; I have a
silly example, where the two buffers contain the rot13'd text for each
other. The main use, though, is that you can transform for example text
so that in one buffer it is an entirely valid program, while in the
other it's valid org mode, (or latex or anything else).

I use it for documenting lentic.el itself. You can see the video for how
this appears:

https://vimeo.com/116078853

and the output of this here:

http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/phillip.lord/lentic/lenticular.html



My motivating use case was to combine Clojure with documentation. Here,
for example is a tutorial on for my Tawny-OWL library:

https://github.com/phillord/tawny-tutorial

which is written in Clojure with comments in asciidoc. The end result of
this (turned into slides) is here:

http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/jennifer.warrender/swat4ls_2015/2015_swat4ls.html


So, lentic can be a replacement for indirect buffers, can support
multi-modal editing (without needing support for either mode), and can
do a form of literate programming, build directly into the editor.

It's actually surprisingly easy to use and intuitive to use in practice.
It seems to be rather harder to explain what it actually does. I
remember the same being true of internet, hyperlinks and the web, so
with any luck lentic will have the same impact. Not holding my breath
though.

Phil