Outlining and cloned entries

Posted by Amontillado
Feb 5, 2023 at 03:45 PM

I’ve often thought it would be nice to be able to have an outline entry appear in more than one place in an outline.

For instance, a flashback to an event already covered in the narrative.

I didn’t realize it until today. Curio has provided that facility for some time. You can copy a text block (figure, in Curio-speak) as a synced instance.

You can also copy list, or outline, entries as synced instances, too.

It’s intriguing. Every entity in Curio has a note attachment, including list entries. Turn on the notes inspector and a Curio list becomes a two pane outliner.

Synced instances also sync their note attachments.

I can have an outline entry appear in more than one place in the outline, which sounds interesting, and I can also paste any single entry in the outline as a synced instance anywhere else in a Curio project (document).

So, there you are, outlining away, creating topics with notes in a hierarchical list.

Next, you pop up a corkboard (idea space, as Curio folk would say) and start making notes about how to express your story. You’ve got a text note up as a sketchpad, and your sketchpad can be flanked with synced instances of character notes, location ideas, plot devices, whatever you want, plus you can paste synced instances of relevant individual outline items, too.

Much of that can be done in Obsidian, but not all. As far as I know, Obsidian’s Canvas plugin won’t allow transclusion of a single outline entry. An idea space in Curio is similar to an Obsidian Canvas.

Even better, it appears the next version of Curio will have a query language. Mind maps, lists, and kanban stacks can be aggregated by query.