This is my preferred way to write sheet music, historically.
I like quickly banging out a leadsheet like this, but I wish Lilypond had some other important functionality.
I dream about writing my own version of lilypond someday, but it's not a high priority of mine. I hope somebody does it.
Here are some things that would be great:
You can see in this document that a custom function had to be made to increase spacing between the header and the sheet music. This is such a foundational concept in sheet music formatting that it should not need to be custom made.
Relatedly, maybe my workflow needs refinement, but I do not find it easy to create reliably formatted leadsheets without a lot of tweaking of unclear and unreliable settings. Like I said, it could be me, but I feel like the main purpose of Lilypond is not reflected in the amount of tweaking that I usually feel that I need to do.
What are they called "sane defaults"? ;)
I wish that a rhythm could be assigned to a melody, and vice versa. This could make transcription so much easier considering how often melodies are repeated with slight rhythmic variation.
Relatedly, considering how often rhythms are repeated with harmonic or chordal variation... well obviously this would be a really useful function.
Considering how often a melodic phrase has a note or two changed, this is an attractive functionality.
Maybe I should just be concatenating variables more. I guess that's a reasonable solution.
But it feels like I should be able to set default rhythms/melodies for a theme and easily call the theme with arguments to create variations.
Honestly, I don't think I can leave lilypond. But I hope that a different language replaces it someday. I don't think it can become what I want, considering that their priorities seem to be very different than mine, and that they don't seem too keen on keeping up with modern modes of development and community management. They don't use github, and I don't think their community is willing to adopt a modern forum for communication, so development and community seems splintered across lots of different locations.
So, I'll keep lilypond indefinitely. But I wish it were easier. I'll probably be adding Dorico to my toolbelt someday, but I still love lilypond because of it's text-only back-upable-ness.
-Dot <3