Two Pane Outliner Shootout

Posted by nathanb
May 22, 2018 at 01:53 AM

Great post, I’ve been tinkering with Dynalist/Workflowy but just couldn’t get comfortable with them and you’ve helped me understand why.

OneNote has been my rock of stability and also anchor that keeps me from moving forward since 2008 or so. I am too addicted to that infinite canvas concept to successfully move on to less fluid but far more powerful knowledge managers. On a PC, it’s just so comfy to dump stuff into and navigate around. Yet I HATE the lack of true tagging and other methods of embedding metadata that keep it forever just an increasing blob of one-hierchary-only loosely-organized pages. Ironically, after waiting about a decade for MS to start adding features for us nerds instead of making it slicker, dumber, and prettier for the masses, they are forcing my hand to abandon ship. They finally officially announced the almost-awesome desktop version is being put into maintenance mode in order to move completely to the ‘universal version’.

I think your list should be expanded a bit to include Rightnote, Infoqube, and Ultra Recall. My personal feature wishlist is:

1. Nested tags (or categories) that enable multiple hierarchies for the same info. I guess this includes transclusion as maybe an even better way to achieve that.

2. BACK LINKS, this is a rare animal and apparently tough to code. Pretty much every platform in existence can do one-way dumb links (that don’t update themselves if their target gets moved or renamed). True two-way linking is a completely different animal. I’m so tired of reading about people stating that you can make your own wiki out of OneNote (I’m also looking at you, notion.so!). No you can’t, not any more than you can out of a directory of text files. Sure it’s a bit easier to do with OneNote but that double brackets auto-creates that page and a link to it is just copying wiki creating, not wiki-being! We need to come up with new terms to differentiate one-way dumb links and two way smart links. The odd thing is there are lightweight platforms that do it (Zim and Tiddlywiki)

I took a look at most of the ones you list and these a few months ago.

NoteCasePro: I was fairly excited about that one since it seemed to offer the flexible hierarchies and tagging and showed backlinks. My notes are telling me it just felt a bit awkward to use and that it’d take some scripting and work to make it work the way I wanted. The ‘what links to here’ function was an add-in that you had to run like a report, as opposed to backlinks just showing automatically. For me, the auto-display of backlinks is the most important reason for backlinks, as a constant reminder of existing structure and prompting the fortuitous re-discovery of connected information that we all seek like Don Quixote in our quest for a true external brain. Also my notes about it remind me it doesn’t do tables. OneNote’s got me addicted to in-line tables. Deal breaker.

UltraRecall: This one might be my favorite example of very powerful (transclusion!) yet still has that comfortable main two-pane hierarchy that my mind seems attracted to like a fly to a light. This is one that can be a true free-form knowledge base and also a very structured personal document management system. Main thing that concerns me about it is that development has slowed down to a crawl over the past few years to the point where it’s on the edge of abandonware cliff along with ConnectedText.

MyInfo: This is the one I have my closest eye one. Not quite as nerdy as UltraRecall but definitely more nerd features than OneNote with ALMOST as slick of an interface. Petko has been teasing V7 for a while now and the forums suggest it’s going to check dang near every CRIMP box (cross-platform and back-linking have been explicitly promised). I’m anticipating V7 so much that it’s kind of put a halt on my CRIMPING because I really want it to be my lifeboat off OneNote.

Rightnote: This is the one I tell myself I SHOULD like much more than I do. The Evernote sync is a dang clever way to be able to make the simple stuff available everywhere without giving up a really powerful desktop nerdfest. The development rate is amazing and it has a lot of compelling tricks. But I think the tagging and lack of two way linking are keeping me from it. If I’m going to jump to a clunkier-but-more-powerful system, I want that journey to give me my back-links!

ConnectedText: I like this so much that I’ve taken several runs at it over the past two years but life kept getting in the way of me getting over the training-wheels stage to experience it’s awesomeness. I tell myself that the apparent end-of-development situation makes it a practical matter to avoid CT. The truth is that I’m scared that if I truly learn it to it’s full capabilities and am STILL wanting for more that it would say way more about my own shortcomings than the software. I haven’t ruled out putting it on a thumb drive and giving it one last shot at work and home. And I do own a license, in part as homage to the vision and achievement of the developer.

Infoqube: This one has me very intrigued right now. It’s perhaps more powerful than any of these and infinitely configurable, which I normally love. Pierre is an amazing developer. He’s my spirit animal if my IQ was 30 points higher, I was much more disciplined, and Canadian. The new mind-mapping trick it does to display connections like CT is huge. I even like that it used to be called SQLnotes and the forums are still based there. Just reminds you that this is the ultimate personal database. It’s the optimus prime of all of these. Just do a bunch of tinkering and it’ll be CT or UltraRecall or some mutant thing in-between. It’s even got GANTT CHARTS. Who doesn’t love gantt charts?! Only me then? Right on. I’ve poked around with it a bit and just can’t get past the initial lost stage. That says a lot more about my capabilities than the software though. I’m looking for a personal wiki that has solid database functionality. IQ feels much more like a free-form database that can act like a wiki. Really, there’s no difference in function, they are all databases, we are just debating GUI’s here. It feels like every time I have the thought “I wish OneNote could do X” it’s IQ that’s always is ready to step up to the plate. It truly checks every box and I think it can be the ultimate two-page outliner….I just don’t quite know how to drive it. Maybe part of the problem is I’m so mesmerized by it’s functions that I have trouble just using a subset until I’m ready to make the leap to next-level PKM-ing. OneNote is the only one I can drive without the interface getting in the way. Perhaps my migration needs to be using something else just like I use OneNote and slowly grow from there rather than being overwhelmed by features and paralyzed with indecision.