[slightly OT] Re: Basic questions about LilyPond.

[Matthias Kilian]

On Wed, Apr 07, 2004 at 02:35:21PM -0700, Hans Forbrich wrote:
> I personally think many people go about the evaluation totally backwards.  
> They first ask 'how easy is it to get started'.  

Well, that seems to be symptomatic for most software today, even in
professional software development departments :-(

> Lilypond, whether on a Windows machine, a Mac or a Linux/Unix box is driven 
> by 
> a very simple keyboard input and edit mechanism (identical on all).  Many 
> people look at that and run away in disgust because they wanbt to place the 
> notes wit ha mouse - not realizing the mouse-based input they hope for will 
> be quicker to learn but ultimately slow them significantly (in my case by 3x 
> longer to do an equivalent score vs my eval of Finale) - your mileage may 
> vary!!!

I'd to abandon playing piano about 3 and a half years ago, since I was
forced to make extensive use of the mouse at work. My right hand is
nearly unusable now. Mouses are the most inergonomical input device one
could think of.

And for the speed of input, it's just that simple: on the keyboard,
you can use *ten* fingers, with the mouse you can typically use two
or three (on Macs: one) finger. To all intrumentalists on this list:
if you need our fingers for playing your instrument, avoid using the
mouse eight hours the day!

A friend of mine had a talk some years ago in which he mentioned to prefer
"that fine, ball-less, non-optical 104 key mouse."

See also:

http://www.gaertner.de/~neitzel/tech-tour/mouse-1.html
http://www.gaertner.de/~neitzel/tech-tour/mouse-2.html

[By incident, the company this guy works at, resides in te old factory
buildings of "Schimmel Pianos" :-)]

> The worst part about Lilypond is that bugs, and problems get fixed too fast 
> and features get implemented too quickly.

Yes, that's really horrible, especially when using the non-stable version:
cvs update, autogen.sh, make. And then you do another cvs update and --
holy sh*t -- there's a new release available :-)

When I filed my first bug report (in january, IIRC), I got an answer
within about twenty minutes. "Oh, an autoresponse," I thought, but it
wasn't. It was Han-Wen's answer "fixed in CVS". Amazing.

Ciao,
        Kili