lightweight 2-pane outliner for breaking up text quickly

Posted by Dr Andus
Feb 5, 2013 at 12:17 PM

I’m still looking for a lightweight two-pane outliner for storage and quick organisation of textual fragments. The main criteria are that it is easy to add a new item (ideally single keystroke, such as “insert” or one mouse-click), and easy to indent/outdent, move up/down. Rich text formatting not essential. But it would be nice if the pasted text would be rendered in some consistent default font I can set up, so I don’t have to change it after each paste.

I’ve tried BrainStorm and ECCO, and they’re both great for what they do, but for my purposes it’s necessary to have the two-pane structure, to have a list in one pane (that I can quickly scan visually), and a couple of paragraphs in the right pane.

Being able to split a text into multiple items (such as Scrivener’s (Ctrl+Shift+K))would be a bonus, but not essential.

Scrivener for Windows would be perfect if it wasn’t such a behemoth. It’s just too sluggish for me. So it’s a replacement for Scriveners.

So far I tried RightNote and NoteCase Pro. RightNote would be almost right but it frustrates me that it’s almost impossible to rename a note item, when that should be the simplest thing in the world. In NoteCase Pro it bugs me that it changes my paste into its own default font, rather than the one I chose.

Any more suggestions?