Re: Free decent one-pane Windows outliner?

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 2254

Posted by ned
2004-10-15 09:49:45

I guess it depends on your editor preference, but you might want to look at using my TVO (the Vim Outliner) (requires a copy of Vim).

I use it all the time, and it does understand tabs as indents (if I understand you correctly, you’d expect to read in a file with tabs and have them become indents, or to hit a tab and influence the indent level).

If you aren’t a Vim user, it may be a bit odd getting started, though you can use TVO in “Vim Easy” mode for a more Windows-like experience.

Ordinarily, Vim is “modal”; in one mode, a ‘j’ key moves down while in another (insert) mode, it inserts a ‘j’, and in another mode, it replaces the character at the cursor with a ‘j’.

Vim Easy gets rid of the modes, so that you use the cursor keys for moving and the letters for inserting (or replacing the selection).

TVO responds to both alt- and ctrl- key combinations as well as key sequences in command mode (if you want the modal experience). It has toolbar buttons and I’ve tried to use the alt- and ctrl- key mappings familiar from Word’s outline mode. (e.g. to move a heading you use alt-shift-arrow keys).

Of course, you can also use Vim/TVO on your Mac, or on your Linux machines.

You can link to other files just by putting their names in square brackets.

TVO also lets you have both headings and body text, and you can extract one or the other to a new file if you want (as well as showing selected levels of headers and separately toggling their text visibility).

As I recall, I implemented OPML import at some point, but it’s a separate command-line utility. There is also a TVO to HTML converter, and a TVO to RTF converter.

Vim: http://vim.org
TVO: http://bike-nomad.com/vim/vimoutliner.html

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