Re: Your Bespoke Lilypond Environment

[David Wright]

On Tue 07 Apr 2020 at 18:00:20 (+0000), Carl Sorensen wrote:
> On 4/7/20, 10:49 AM, "cgilmore" <address@hidden> wrote:
> > I was curious what everyone's setup is like for writing Lilypond,
> > specifically, for any non-Frescobaldi users. We all know Frescobaldi is
> > great and probably the most ideal environment for Lilypond, but I'm
> > personally curious what other people are using and how they're using
> > it—mostly looking for inspiration from others.
> > 
> > I keep ebbing in and out of Lilypond usage, so I by no means have any kind
> > of hardcore environment setup. I use Neo-Vim for text editing, a simple
> > JavaScript Node script that watches my .ly files and recompiles them when I
> > save changes, and use the stock macOS Preview app to view the PDF (the
> > weakest link, as a far as I'm concerned). Oh, and I guess I also will have a
> > Safari window open to the documentation. 
> > 
> > Other than the vim usage, there's a lot I don't like about my setup,
> > personally, and it keeps changing every time I jump back into writing.
> 
> I used to use vim and Preview on macOS.
> 
> Now I use Frescobaldi.  I always miss my vim commands, but point-and-click is 
> so useful that it's worth using Frescobaldi, for my experience.

I don't know how close macOS is to linux, but point-and-click can be
used between vim and PDF viewers without having to install Frescobaldi.
There were a couple of threads in February last year about tidying up
the wrinkles in their configuration on different systems.
  Configuration Point & Click
  The Guide to getting Point and Click going …
In my case, I was simply using the two programs, editor and viewer,
as I don't run any Desktop Manager or Environment, but simply a
Window Manager (fvwm).

No idea what a Preview app is, but I assume there are a bunch of PDF
viewers out there to try. Probably not all will support point-and-click
of course; at least, not simply.

My own setup consists of:

1) either one xterm running unwindowed emacs on the source file(s),
   or a windowed emacs doing the same;
2) one xterm running a bash script that compiles the source, displays
   the log (but preserves it on error), renumbers the MIDI files (so
   they collate sensibly), postprocesses the output files, etc;
3) xpdf PDF viewer displaying the output.
4) optionally, another viewer allowing blink comparison of two
   versions when making fine positional adjustments.
5) optionally, viewers with other scanned manuscripts.

This is all laid out across several viewports in fvwm for efficiency
and to avoid any need for using a mouse. (Details, like the
interaction between window focus and mouse movements, can be quite
important in maximising ergonomic efficiency.)

Cheers,
David.