Post a message

The LilyPond Report — Greetings Jan! Wow, it is an honor for the Report to meet with you today; for years I guess I’ve just been too intimidated to suggest an interview with either you or Han-Wen...

Jan Nieuwenhuizen - - Hi Valentin! Yeah, I love the Report. Good, great!

TLR — Thanks! Let’s get started then. What exactly is Schikkers List? Never mind — let me quote your README file for you:

README —

Schikkers List is a LilyPond GUI in the prototype phase. I have no idea if this approach could even result in a usable program. [...] The basic is to have LilyPond render only a small bit of the music: the bit that changed. [...] Simple LilyPond files can be entered and saved as .scm or exported as .ly files.

This is targeted at hackers and mainly presented as an invitation for comments and possibly for patches.

JN — That’s right. There are so many bugs/missing features that I’ll only be taking patches for now; at least until v0.1 or so.

Schikkers List’s {iKLi} interface

courtesy of Jan Nieuwenhuizen.
Animated PNG: you need Firefox or Opera to see it...

TLR — Okay, now that you’ve made this clear, let me ask you the question everyone must be asking themselves by now: what’s with the name ?? I mean, "Schikkers List"? Really?

JN — I know. "Schikkers List" is probably just as incapable of surviving as "Ikebana", but well

List is the dutch translation of "a guile scheme". It does not mean list[en], that word is lijst (Liste in German). Translating Ikebana into Dutch, you get Bloemschikken where bloem == flower. The person who performs Ikebana would be a Bloemschikker (arranger of flowers).

TLR — ...

JN — Wait, it gets worse: one such schikker/arranger had a guile scheme: only recompute the part that changed to arrange notes, and in contrast to Ikebana who used python, this one uses GUILE Scheme.

TLR — Er. Okay, we’ll let our audience re-read this a couple of times... For the record: I didn’t even know that "guile" was actually a word

Schikkers List’s key bindings

TLR — (*cough*) Back on track. Obviously, the GNOME-Canvas plan has been on the table for some time now; I also can understand why you chose Guile/Scheme over python (since most of LilyPond itself is natively implemented in this language). What else inspired you?

JN — I was inspired first by Frescobaldi: how quick that was, but discouraged by how fully it is entangled with KDE, and it’s still a text editor that will never compete with Emacs.

Then I was inspired by the gummi editor: I wrote a 20-line patch that made some sort of frescobaldi-like gui.

Then I was inspired by how fast and how usable Ikebana was.

TLR — Wait — "usable"??? How come all of us haven’t been using it ever since then?

JN — Well, it wasn’t just like that in 2005: it was neither fast, nor usable. Also, LilyPond has come a long way since 2004...

I want to learn programming in scheme, that seems such a nice language and I’m such a novice. I had to do all that alone because nobody can know about it, as I should be working on my open source consultancy startup company, and anything else is procrastination, which looks real bad.

I also think you should be have some real code before you start to talk vaporware, which is why I had to start alone. But I’m not going to do a project like this on my own, so if others are interested that would really help.

TLR — I’d be happy to help, except for one thing: I’m a KDE guy. There’s no way I’ll *ever* install GNOME on my system. So, I guess this is good-bye...

JN — Not at all! Schikkers List is not gnome dependent, just GTK. I started off using the pangocairo backend, which requires very recent builds of guile-gnome (later than 2.16.1). However, the GNOME canvas was not deprecated after all, so I’m using this as a backend now, which allows running with guile-gnome 2.16.1 (or possibly even 2.16).

TLR — Interesting. Now for the embarrassing part. For almost fifteen years, we’ve seen Han-Wen and you telling people that a GUI was just The Wrong Way, that LilyPond would never have a GUI because it wasn’t meant to in the first place and it would be useless anyway. So I hope you won’t mind me asking: who are you kidding, really? Was all that non-GUI motto just a pile of hypocrite bullshit?

JN — Keep it cool... LilyPond is not conceived, indeed, to be used in a GUI setting. Period.

There are so many good reasons why GUI programs in general, and a GUI for setting text or music specifically, are a bad idea! You get "expert users" and tricks and mouse-click video’s on YouTube etc. Can’t script it anymore.

However. LilyPond was created to free the world of badly typeset music and to help *all* musicians. Of course, we want everyone to enjoy the freedom of Linux and move there. However, this was the mind-shift that caused us to make the Windows/mingw and Apple/darwin ports. We cannot demand that people change their OS for their own good, happiness and health.

TLR — Well, I certainly would, but...

JN — The idea of my ikli interface is to do away with the text editor (there may be a structured text editor one day) because I think that the vast majority of potential users will never /start/ with lilypond if they have to enter text, even if there’s visual feedback.

If the mere fact that LilyPond does not have a very good GUI, will mean that in the end we as musicians are still stuck (again stuck) with badly typeset music because "people /will/ use a GUI even if it handcuffs them", it’s bad for their health and happiness etc., what’s a hacker to do?

TLR — ... Well, you tell me!

JN — We/I have been "waiting" for years to get Eric Sandberg’s work completed and have full-blown music streams in LilyPond. That would be the first step towards the remote possibility of a GUI. This did not happen and I do not foresee it to happen any time soon.

So, Schikkers List is another guile scheme to turn this dependency around. Instead of first waiting for boring, useless work to be done that should enable a gui, just make a gui first and when it grows, we can always decide that music streams are essential, integrate Schikkers List with LilyPond and just finish them.

On the other hand, it could well be that there will never be a v0.0.2 and this is just another silly pipe dream.

TLR — I sure hope not!

A real-world score: "Ständchen"

JN — If you get to use Schikkers List, you’ll see that, as I said, LilyPond is not conceived for a GUI approach — however, it may just be good enough. I don’t know. The big question here is: who can tell [me] what the very minimal set of requirements is that makes a gui useful, esp. for people who would never use text entry for music, and is there a path from this minimal version to more useful versions for real world music?

TLR — Well, perhaps our readers can help answering that question However, isn’t there a risk that you may reinventing the wheel here? You do know that Denemo development has been revived for the past couple of years, and produces a nice interface already... Besides, many users appreciate the Frescobaldi/LilyPondTool "code on the left, preview on the right" paradigm; can you seriously believe that anyone will want to use a GUI program that hides the LilyPond code from the user?

JN — Let me be clear. Backed with the right amount of hacking effort, Schikkers List will just totally blow away all the other efforts.

Of course, the lily code will also be available in a separate window and we’ll have some sort of structure-editor that feels like a text editor but is very annoying because it has to make sure you cannot enter invalid lily code We’ll also have a music-tree view window where you can select/edit the underlying music structure.

For years to come however, Denemo will be a great GUI. As for Frescobaldi/LilyPondTool, these aim at people who want to write code — those are not real GUIs, are they? People who would benefit from Frescobaldi will probably also use lilypond without this nice preview...

TLR — Well, thank you Jan, and good luck: you’ll need it! Anything we normal people can do to help, other than turning into programmer-demigods and sending you patches? How about suggesting a nice logo for Schikkers List?

JN — A logo. Man, this is a pile of rubbish, get real! Love, peace, thanks.

Many thanks to Jan Nieuwenhuizen for this interview.