The ultimate outliner

Posted by Dr Andus
Jan 16, 2013 at 01:00 PM

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>Re the original thread question, after so many years working with
>different tools, I am less interested in seeing more operational
>features being added, than in the interoperability of different
>applications.

Sure, but isn’t that the effect of there not being an “ultimate outliner” or something reasonably close to it? I don’t mean to engage in utopian yearning, I realise things move on and there never will be an “ultimate outliner” per se. But we could still have a common set up features that are considered to be the gold standard and which developers aspire to.

Also, I wasn’t implying that the “ultimate outliner” would need to have a huge number of features. It’s about having the right kind of features, and simplicity can be one of the criteria (e.g. to have a distraction-free mode, such as Scrivener).

Plus, to achieve general interoperability, one would need some sort of a community consensus between outliner developers, which I just can’t see arising anytime soon (especially as development gets abandoned).

E.g. one thing that frustrates me is that I don’t seem to be able to export and import outline items with notes from outliner to outliner without the notes being lost. Is there a way e.g. to export a Bonsai (or any other single-pane) outline with notes and import them into Freeplane (with notes preserved)? I haven’t been able to do so with OPML or anything else that I tried. I can export them into RTF, but that seems to be it.