Markdown vs WSYWYG

Posted by 22111
Sep 10, 2013 at 07:57 PM

Thank you both very much, Chris Murtland and MadAboutDana. I think your explanations are really helpful and shed a good light on ingenious software; I understand better now why in the Kühn blog, it’s so “over-celebrated” as I might say.

If I understand well, you don’t even need the wiki, you can treat it as an outliner, or let’s say you have some item, but which in fact is sort of a “main topic”, from which then its own, partial outline emerges, by your creating children, grand-children, and so on, from there, and in that particular outline.

Coming from Ultra Recall, I have never seen any real solution, in UR, to the problem that that one outline tree grows bigger and bigger; kinook, the developer, offers hoisting to other tabs, but then, any work you will do there, in that subtree (renames / moves of items, but also expanding/collapsing subtrees further down within the hierarchy, are replicated, real-time, within your first, “complete”, “overall” tree.

Don’t get me wrong, of course this replication of the overall tree is necessary, and UR is technically faultless here (as with most other things; just search brings problems, sometimes), but the problem here, this endless instant replicating, also to that DISPLAYED “full tree”, makes that in UR, there is no such thing as an “overview”: As soon as you have such hoisted sub-trees, you will LOOSE your “content tree” by this very move: There is no possibility in UR to have a “general view”, and a detailed view, let alone more than one detailed view, at the same time: No way to have some tree just with the first- and second-level-indented main topics, and other trees showing details in some part of this big tree.

So this is a very important problem, discussed in their forum for years, and which has never even been considered to be problem by kinook, let alone for them to search for a solution (which would consist in a virtual representation of the big tree, but independent of it, display-wise, and in which you only could select items to hoist from there, and select items to expand or recollapse; ideally, this special “JUST LOOK AND CHOOSE FROM TREE” would be in an additional pane, but technically, it could also be realized in just another tab (perhaps differently colored or such for better distinction)).

But as said, in UR, there is no such thing (not speaking of other outliner I tried: none does it or something similar).

So from what you both say, it seems CT has found another, but a real solution to this problem no (other) outliner of my knowledge is aware of.

1) Is this wishful thinking of mine, or am I right to say, then, that in CT you could have a pane with a topics list, and then you could click on it, and the corresponding outline (sub-tree of that topic; it’s understood that sub-outline must exist of course, in order to be opened here) will open within another pane? (I’ve seen screenshots for CT showing one pane to the left, the “text” / content pane in the middle, and a second pane to the right.)

2) And if this is so, does CT have any import routines allowing for importing EXISTANT trees/subtrees, from a program like UR, into such a compound (even one by one, not speaking of the overall tree here in one single import move)? The “import of existing structes is almost impossible” problem is there in “The Brain”, so most people with existing databases will not make the move; here, it could be the very same problem, I fear.

3) But if this is possible (not necessarily from UR, but perhaps from a third program), that old question arises what CT is doing about its 1985 markup scheme. (And for people wanting to do the move even now, without wysiwyg, the question arises if in import, rtf (which is lost here) is correctly translated into CT markup.)

This being said, I would think CT is a very ingenious outliner which has fully its place in this forum!

Thank you very much again for your explanations.