I missed this post. In an outliner, discontiguous topic selection is more important than discontiguous text selection, agreed. What I was saying is that BrainStorm provides for discontiguous topic selection, thereby obviating the limitation of the plaint text medium BrainStorm uses. From what you say, though, OS X is ahead of Windows XP on inherently including discontiguous text selection. Of course, XP is no longer the standard, and I haven't tried Vista.

David Dunham wrote:

Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>BrainStorm overcomes the main _limitation_ in
manipulating plain text: the
>potential for multiple discontiguous text
selection seems to be a property of rtf and
>not plain text. MS Word has it; no plain
text editor that I'm aware of does. (Maybe
>someone knows of an exception/)

I know
you're talking about Windows, but on Mac OS X, TextEdit (the moral equivalent of
Notepad/Wordpad) does discontiguous selection just fine.

I've never used it.
What I do use is multiple topic selection (like in Opal) -- select a bunch of topics and
change them all to bold (or whatever). Opal supports discontiguous selection within
a topic, but I'll bet almost all Mac outliners do.