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Posted by andyjim
Sep 11, 2013 at 11:45 AM

Thanks much, Dr. Andus, for your input. Been reading you here and there, and I doubt there are many as informed as you on this stuff.
Most do not have their own filenames (I should’ve made that clear), as I generate them in a sort of stream of consciousness file, which I do in Word outline. I call it a freeboard, and do one each year.
I’ve used Word outline for nearly 20 years I guess, and love it. Clean - no messy icons, bullets, etc. I can drop a bunch of loose text in, slap it into outline view and massage it with keystrokes. Can you do this (drop text in, then mess with it in the outliner) in other outliner apps? I’ve tried only a few (shallow pockets).
So one of my questions should have been, can I do this (drop text in, then outline it) in CT? I will need to be able to for my project.
As to the outline window in CT - I cannot close it. I hit the x and it just pops up the save message; will not close. And I cannot open a new outline - pops up the save message again. But, once I find what I’m doing wrong with that, it sounds as though you’re saying I cannot have more than one outline window open at once in CT. Hmm. Everything I write is in outline, because Word outline, with its keystroke manipulation, is my rearranging tool, and Word outline is so clean. It’s really the ease of manipulation, as much as the outline format itself, that I’m after.
Ok, that gets me to another requirement for my project: I want to have a number of snippets open on the desktop, shuffle them around, stack them up, snip and move text from one to another, gather them and slap them all into an outline for further massaging. I’d prefer each window, each snippet have outline capability, but can do without that if I can manipulate snippets freely. (Gingko?)
Do any of the other apps you suggested (Zim, Wikidpad, TheBrain, Piggydb, MS OneNote, myBase or UltraRecall) have good clean outline and snippet manipulation capabilities?
As you notice, I’m not even mentioning wiki capabilities, but that’s only because I have no experience with wiki. I’d probably like it a lot, maybe even wonder how I ever got along without, but in my ignorance of that, outlining and text manipulation are my priorities. I might sing a different tune if I got my feet wet with something like CT. I guess it’s more or less relational vs hierarchic. I think the ideal would be both, which CT sort of is, I gather. Yet it may lack the efficient text manipulation I’m looking for.
Or perhaps the right combination of apps, something like the way you (Dr. Andus) approach things, might better suit my particular quirkiness. Two, three, even four simple apps, if they work well together, might do better than one monolith. Any thoughts?
Sorry so lengthy. Don’t know how to be brief.