Using Sublimetext as an outliner

Posted by dan7000
May 13, 2016 at 05:59 PM

A few months ago I switched from a number of other solutions I was using (Treepad, Outliner for Android, Notebooks by A. Schmid, workflowy and others) to using a programmer’s text editor called SublimeText as my primary outliner. As I’ll explain below, it has a lot of the same outlining functionality you get with something like FoldingText; better outlining than Notebooks and others, and lots of advanced tools that can be useful.

It has been working great for a couple months and so I thought I’d finally post about it here. First, the key reasons I use it instead of other tools:

1. I now use ios, Windows, and Android every day and I need something that syncs between them. Most solutions just don’t work well. This one is plain text.
2. While SublimeText is only for Windows, all the files are pure text files and can be opened and edited on numerous apps in ios and Android. I do most of my serious editing on Windows though.
3. I want the cloud sync to be secure. Tresorit recently released a text editor that’s built into it’s secure cloud app for IOS and Android - it lets be browse files on those platforms in a tree view and edit text files without leaving the cloud browser. And did I mention it’s secure? The files are synced to folders on my PC that are SublimeText “projects”
4. SublimeText not only has a file browser - which you can set to view only specific folders based on a “project” - but also has outlining features in the text editor - so you get a 2-pane outliner with outlining in both panes.

Biggest drawback: it’s plain text only. This used to be a dealbreaker for me but after workflowy and others I’ve gotten used to it - and it’s basically the only way to get consistent cross-platform notes.

Here is a screenshot of SublimeText with a sample outline I created: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s1/nl/6735/034f5a47-1ba9-4660-8a77-3e918d52a00e
(please let me know if you cannot access and I’ll try posting somewhere else)

As you can see in the screenshot, the left pane is a file/folder browser. This, and many other parts of my setup, require custom options, of which SublimeText has tons. See https://sublime-text-unofficial-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/sublime-text-2/index.html

More importantly for outline fans, the right pane has a real, editable text outline. Like in Workflowy and others, you can change the indentation of a line by pressing tab or shift-tab. But what makes it an outliner to me is the “code folding” functionality. See the little arrows to the left of the text? If you click those, the child items are hidden - and any wrapped text is hidden as well, with a little icon to indicate that’s happened.

Here’s another screenshot of the same outline with some of the items collapsed: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s1/nl/6735/0b727fde-1097-4b7b-b48e-0e69ecd643d5

And there are a lot of really cool functions that go beyond basic outlining and folding: