The ultimate outliner

Posted by Dr Andus
Jan 20, 2013 at 08:20 PM

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
Dr Andus wrote:
>>Just to distill what I was getting at in the previous post: I think the
>>ultimate outliner needs to have a very easy (drag-n-drop, hotkey,
>>markup) internal and external linking capability, so that all items and
>>notes can be linked to each other, can link to items and notes in other
>>applications, and they can be linked to from other apps too.
> >I beg to (partly) differ: as far as external linking goes, your approach
>is fine for me, as the linked material isn’t within the outline anyway,
>so one might as well deal with it as if it were a footnote or endnote;
>i.e. with a [1] or other mark within the detail text, which links to the
>external resource. I think it could also be useful to automatically
>gather all such external links in a separate pane.

I realise the wiki way is not everyone’s cup of tea. However, what I had in mind here doesn’t necessarily have to be implemented the wiki way. I was thinking of ConnectedText’s outlining capabilities when I was writing this. For one, CT can be used as a single-pane and a two-pane outliner without using any of its wiki functionality (seriously!). In CT’s outliner there is no such thing as internal linking between outline items. All you can link to is CT’s topics (notes) with a simple drag-and-drop, which then creates a two-pane outliner (outline items + notes), if you wish. In this case these links are “external” to CT’s outliner but “internal” to the overall CT application, as you are linking to CT topics.

If you wanted to add proper “external links” to URLs and other files and apps, those can only be added within the body of the CT topics (notes), but then you’d need to use the wiki linking markup. But I don’t insist on this for the “ultimate outliner.” These could also be implemented the MS Word way…

>However, in respect to internal links, it seems to me that the usual
>URL-type link actually works counter-productively. The reason is that if
>you put this in the detail text, it is not shown in the outline, and
>thus obscures the real structure.

When I was talking about “internal links,” I had Freeplane in mind, where you can link from one node to another. This can become useful once you have a very big outline and you may end up repeating yourself or touching on related topics, in which case linked topics help navigating (jumping) from one deep node to another related one at some other distant spot in the outline.

>I believe that clones are a much more outline-friendly solution to the
>issue of internal linking: if entity A in the outline refers to entity B
>in the same outline, all you have to do is create a clone of the
>referenced entity (B) as a child or sibling of entity A. This reference
>is then apparent in the outline, helping someone see both the wood and
>the tree.

Perhaps the two could be optional alternatives, i.e. one could choose between “internal link” or clone, in the manner of BrainStorm’s namesakes(?)

>I have never appreciated the wiki way in particular; I find it very
>powerful but non-conducive to structure. Again, for me outliners are
>tools to bring order out of chaos, and therefore structure is paramount.
>It appears that the Piggydb creator has a similar issue with wikis,
>because the main way to link text fragments in Piggydb is outside the
>fragment detail, making the relationships an integral part of the
>fragment overview.

I agree that outliners are for ordering things. However, my original proposition about the “ultimate outliner” was to span the whole writing process, from note-taking to drafting. So I could imagine some wiki functionality being useful for note-taking, tagging, analysis, organising. Then one can move on to hierarchical ordering using a specific outliner tool, whereby you pick out wiki documents containing textual fragments and start attaching them to a hierarchical outline (creating order out of chaos).

This is in fact exactly what CT’s wiki + outliner can do. I recommend Steve’s blog post on how this works (although I prefer to dock CT’s outliner on the left, to simulate the traditional two-pane outliner look and feel):
http://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/outlining-in-connectedtext/

But, this does not need to be a wiki functionality. If piggydb can offer a different way, that’s great. Or maybe it’s just a matter of being able to have both a hierarchical view of folders containing notes and a flat view and a network view…