about outlining ...

Posted by jimspoon
Sep 10, 2011 at 01:38 AM

a spinoff from the “state of the art” thread.

I’ve come to a few conclusions (for my own use, anyway).

An “outliner”, in a strict sense, is a tool for displaying text segments of variable length in the familiar hierarchical tree, the highest level starting at the left (except for Hebrew and Arabic I guess!) and each subsequent lower level being indented one tab stop to the right than the next preceding higher level. To be an “outliner”, a program has to enable you *within the confines of a single-pane* to:

(1) see the entire outline in a single pane, or as many items as will fit in the pane.
(2) expand or collapse the entire outline or any item to any desired level, using keystrokes.
(3) split an item via keystroke into two items, or merge multiple items into a single item.
(4) move items (with their subitems) to any other place in the hierarchy, using keystrokes.

Examples: Grandview, Ecco, Infoqube.

I contrast this with programs that display the contents of only a single item at a time in an editor pane, with arrangeable item “titles” in a separation navigation tree pane. (e.g. UltraRecall). I need to be able to see the entirety of the multiple text items in their context as I am expanding, collapsing, splitting, or rearranging them.

(In UR, you can display a grid of child items, and you could display a column of multi-line “item text” cells in this grid - but they are not indented in the grid.)

Now UR looks like a great information manager - for displaying / filtering / sorting multi-field items in a grid. But I’ve come to realize that when I’m brainstorming, the outlining functions mentioned above are essential.

Ecco and Infoqube do a good job of combining the outlining functions, AND the grid of multi-field items.

Of course, sometimes we deal with units of information - entire web pages, tables, graphics, etc that don’t fit well into the outliner pane - these properly go into a separate editor/viewer pane. UR and Infoqube do well on this.

Generally I think it’s a bad idea to put your information into the “text editor pane” as opposed to the outliner pane, unless you really have to. The more you break up your info into separate outline items, the more flexibility you have for viewing/arranging/filtering/sorting that info.

Another little point about terminology - I’ve never liked the term “single-pane” outliner, because it implies that the fewer panes you have the better. It’s not how many panes you have, what matters is how much you can do in the outliner pane, without having to jump between panes. But if “single pane” outliner means that you have the full panoply of outlining functions all within the contents of a single pane, then that’s ok.

So for my purposes Infoqube looks like the state of the art, though I’m still relying on Ecco for now.

(btw - “Mindmap” programs leave me completely flat - give me outlines and grids!)