Single-pane outliners

Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 21, 2012 at 03:57 PM

Dr Andus wrote:
Cassius wrote:
>I know it has been said that the Bonsai screen shots don’t do it
>>justice, BUT they surely turn me off.
> >The Bonsai interface is fairly customisable. You can make it look like a
>basic single-pane outliner. Here is a screenshot of my setup. Please
>note that colouring in the font and the background is optional (i.e.
>those are my choices). You can have it in black and white, if you
>prefer.
http://drandus.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/natara_bonsai.png

BTW, you can save your preferred background colour scheme under View > Global Settings > Fonts (setting slightly different colours for “Bkg Color 1” and “Bkg Color 2” will produce the striped effect), and you can save the the preferred outline level text colour under View > New Outline Defaults > Colors.

Having the outline level colours saved as default is particularly helpful when you need to dump a flat list into Bonsai and make sense of it quickly by organising it into groups and hierarchies (like you would with BrainStorm or Maxthink). As soon as you start indenting items (hit Tab), they change colour according to the presets.

I use this process as part of my analytical workflow. E.g. after ending up with a long flat list of observations and conclusions (having annotated a reading in ConnectedText), I just copy and paste the resulting list into Bonsai and organise the disparate observations into a meaningful outline. This way I can start seeing patterns and groups of observations and draw some final conclusions more easily. Then I link to this Bonsai file from the given CT topic.