Outline/reference on the left, work on the right; skeuomorphism or deeper reasons?

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 26, 2018 at 01:23 PM

Hugh wrote:

>I’m the same. Isn’t it a cultural “accustomisation” in the Western
>world? From the early days of learning to read, my eyes and brain have
>become accustomed to scanning for sense from left to right, and,
>furthermore, from scanning from macro on the left to micro on the right.
>The indentation of indented lists works that way;

Indeed. My understanding is that two-pane outliners evolved from one-pane outliners, which themselves are an active version (collapse/expand) of indented lists, so the paradigm has been maintained.

>even, for me, horizontal mind-maps look awkward if the “head-node” is on the right.

I believe that Tony Buzan’s original concept of mind maps foresees their omnidirectional development in an effort to provide multiple perspectives of the central topic. While software implementations provide additional ‘formats’, these usually represent limitations of the original concept, e.g. ‘affinity’ (top down), left to right, ‘funnel’ (right to left). The latter was discussed sometime ago here https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6428