Although my work is often busy, there are also periods of waiting between appointments. There might be a computer or two being updated but even that is mainly waiting with only a few points of direct interaction. One of the things I’ve done to fill the time is work on transcribing various bits of music into Lilypond files. As the files are text based, it just needs a text editor but, with more complex pieces, it can take a long while to debug the results when I get back home and can see how the results display as music.

I can’t install Lilypond (or Frescobaldi, my preferred GUI editing environment) onto the work machine but today I discovered a website called Hacklily, which allows me to check the scripts online. It does run a bit slowly if trying to type the commands in directly but the workaround of typing up elsewhere and pasting in chunks as they are ready seems to be effective. It also felt a bit slow on a longer score but my “cheat” there was to change earlier sections to a series of (easy-to-render) rest bars.

Hacklily isn’t a full substitute for a local editing environment but it seems to be working well to meet a simpler need of doing some troubleshooting while I build my file – a solution worthy of the ‘hack’ title.