The ultimate outliner

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jan 18, 2013 at 06:41 PM

OK then, I will succumb; I will let my imagination go wild; I will let it fly beyond the mountains of flatland, dive into the valley of outlining, land atop the tree of the million branches and engage in a discussion of endless possibilities.

An outliner is for me above all a tool to build order out of chaos; so, starting from chaos, my ideal outliner would help me gather my building elements from a variety of sources, so it should:
- autopaste content from the clipboard, ideally with an option to strip formatting and keep the text only
- be available via a global hotkey to rapidly create a new note or view the full material
- be able to read and import data from a variety of databases, text formats and hierarchical tools
- work in multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, Android at least) and be Dropbox-friendly
- be able to read an email address so that I can mail it material from anywhere

and moving on to order, it should be able to reorganise the elements in a variety of ways, such as
- multi-select / mark and gather
- drag and drop
- buckets / throw / retrieve
- split or join information entities
- hierarchical tags
- columns for metadata fields of different kinds, including dates, boolean, numbers / support calculations on the hierarchy
- clones
- search and highlight / find-replace
- sort / rearrange
- footnotes / endnotes
- regular expressions and macros for all of the above
- multiple views, including flat, tag hierarchy, hoist, 1- or 2-pane (detail text inline or in second pane), mind map, 3-D mind map (with rotate and the like), show from point of view of entity x, minimal full screen view, etc.
- zoomable view / auto-expand to specific level
- multiple document interface

all this in a convenient way, i.e.
- keyboard shortcuts for everything
- boilerplate / saved hierarchies

I am contemplating whether my ideal outliner would support rich text formatting; in truth I find it distracting; on the other hands plain text is lousy for tables and other complex information elements… What the heck, since I can ask for anything, I would want
- full rich text formatting capabilities, including auto-styling of different levels, with several preformatted and customisable templates
- a simplified plain text view
- real-time hierarchical word count

Last but not least, it should be able to export its outcomes, ideally syncing with a tool which is more powerful in terms of formatting for publishing.

Interestingly, I believe I have access to just about every one of the above features in some tool that I own, but of course very few combine a good number of them. It is as if developers often believe that the one useful feature they provide should be enough for everyone.