Thursday, May 16, 2013; 11:55:16 AM Eastern
Why Dave Wynn uses Fargo
- Over on our Community Feed for Fargo users, a conversation started about how people are loving writing code with Fargo. This really surprised me, because we haven't done much to encourage this. There's a simple feature in the app that allows you to run a single-line of JavaScript code. This means you can call any routine that's in Fargo, or in Bootstrap, jQuery or in the core JavaScript libraries.
- We have it in there because it's useful for one-liners, for debugging the app. It's not meant to make it a programming environment. But some people seem to love it. I wanted to know why, so I asked. And what came back from Dave Wynn, a user who I had not met until this exchange, was a simple and eloquent explanation of why Fargo is a great product (I happen to agree with him of course, but then it's partly my creation). Here's what he said, of course in an outline (Fargo is an outliner).
- It's as cross platform as it gets
- I use Windows at work and Linux at home, and making everything play nice (even with Dropbox) can be a HUGE pain
- Linux also doesn't get a lot of love with regard to clean, user-focused apps
- It's file backed
- I couldn't get into Workflowy because I couldn't trust that they wouldn't just disappear one day, leaving all of my thoughts unavailable in the ether
- I got into org-mode precisely because of this, but it took a lot of tweaking in order to work, and even then still missed some basic things like spell-check (which needed a diferent engine for each platform... see above)
- I can inspect it much more easily than other software
- Sure I know I can't see everything that's going on, but I can press the F12 key, and that makes little mods much more possible for a beginner like me
- Feedback is immediate
- CSS changes kick in right away, and there's no crazy compile step in order to get things right