My experience is limited to PC-Outline and an ancient CP/M version of Think Tank, so probably this re-invents a wheel that some outliners already have. Nonetheless it would be nice to be able to define some kind of template for how much detail you wanted to see at the cursor point, and how you wanted detail to reduce above and below the cursor point, and then have these rules automatically applied as you moved the cursor up and down.

Without getting excessively technical about it, you could have a mode that worked like a photographic wide-angle lens with detail falling off quickly away from the cursor, versus telephoto modes where it would fall off more slowly.

I've thought of this feature, especially for the small-screen devices such as the Palm. It might be useful to be able to see one-line headers of all of an item's ancestors otherwise it is easy to lose track of position. I believe I even suggested that this be included in Brain Forest without response.