Suggestions for development of cross-platform Linux Outliner Note-taking software

Posted by Derek Cornish
Sep 15, 2009 at 01:16 AM

Steve,

I couldn’t agree more about GV as an exemplar of genuine outlining. The problem - especially in Windows - is that there are all too many limited look-alike note-making programs (misleadingly calling themselves “outliners”), made from the same bolted together components, but few examples of really good single-pane outliners, let alone full-scale writing environments like GV’s.

Note-making and single-pane outlining lie at the core of non-fiction and fiction writing, yet there is nothing readily available in Windows to illustrate what can be achieved in terms of the outlining component:

Inspiration - limited and clunky
Notemap - elegant but limited and buggy
PocketThinker - promising but no longer around
Word - limited outlining, and embedded within an unappealing word-processor
Brainstorm - a good start but needs its aerial view to be directly editable
Maxthink for Windows - awkward to use
Ecco - pretty, but limited
OneNote - clunky
InfoQube; and Zoot 6 - yet to be explored properly.

Of course these are just my personal views based on my purchases over the years. And what it all boils down to is that in the end I have always had to go back to GV in order to get any decent work done. As many of us have commented, it certainly would be nice to have a Treeview/Keynote/MyInfo type of note-taking program that provided a GV-style fully-featured single-pane outliner as an option for its right-hand editing pane (with further options for plain text, rtf, and html editing as required). But as always the “easy” part is the note-taking program; the hard part is the single-pane outlining component - which is why it is rarely attempted, and never done properly.

Given the apparently limited market for such “writing environments” on the Windows platform, maybe the only route is the open source one. But I have seen little evidence of promising developments in that sector either.

Derek