Hi All,

I'm looking for a outliner-style notetaking software à la Workflowy, which allows you to nest everything in a hierarchical tree structure, but where you can select any level of hierarchy and view only items of that level separately. So for example every level 1 line can be a header, and level 2 textbook notes, then on the 3rd level you write your own comments and questions, and can separately view and export that level only. Or you decide to add things to the second level only and need an overview of all that's in there without clutter. In Workflowy and other similar software, the entire tree hierarchy functions effectively as 1 block of text. Is there any way to accomplish what I described that you know of? It doesn't necessarily have to be outliner software though.

There's Gingko which can somewhat do this from a visual standpoint but that's just a crutch.

You are referring to hoisting, I think. There are so many tools that have that function. InfoQube, RightNote, Whizfolders, NoteCase and Brainstorm are among some that quickly come to mind. More visual representations (mindmaps) can do this too. Freeplane, MindManager, XMind and of course, TheBrain.

Jon

Check out the Level Selector in Outline 4D (Win only):

https://drandus.wordpress.com/2013/01/13/outline-4d-for-drafting-and-reverse-outlining/

Lucine wrote:

I'm looking for a outliner-style notetaking software à la
Workflowy, which allows you to nest everything in a hierarchical tree
structure, but where you can select any level of hierarchy and view only
items of that level separately. So for example every level 1 line can be
a header, and level 2 textbook notes, then on the 3rd level you write
your own comments and questions, and can separately view and export that
level only.

A less elegant solution (than Outline 4D's built-in level selector) could be to add tags to each paragraph in WorkFlowy, such as @Level1, @Level2, @Level3 etc., and then search for those tags, and only those paragraphs would be displayed. Then you could copy and paste to export.

I forgot Ultra Recall

Jon


Jon Polish wrote:

You are referring to hoisting, I think. There are so many tools that
have that function. InfoQube, RightNote, Whizfolders, NoteCase and
Brainstorm are among some that quickly come to mind. More visual
representations (mindmaps) can do this too. Freeplane, MindManager,
XMind and of course, TheBrain.

Jon

Dr Andus wrote:

Check out the Level Selector in Outline 4D (Win only):

https://drandus.wordpress.com/2013/01/13/outline-4d-for-drafting-and-reverse-outlining/

Dr. Andus, YES thank you so much for this suggestion! This software seems INCREDIBLY powerful. I am getting "software high" from seeing the idea so well-implemented :D And your suggestion for adding tags to Workflowy that way is great as well, works as a quick solution when there are only a few items.

@Jon, it's not really hoisting that I'm looking for, since Hoisting shows the parent hierarchies for each "item" that I want to isolate. For example, if I only want level 3 items from each tree, then it would show me level 1 + level 2+ level 3 for Item 1, then the same 3 levels for item 2, and so on. Whereas I was looking to isolate ONLY items of level 3 and not have levels 1 and 2 be visible.

I see. I think InfoQube can be set to do this, although Pierre would have to advise.

Jon

Devonthink will do this, although you have to take steps to preserve manual sort order.

Create a smart group (filter, sort of). Tell it to search in the group (folder) you're interested in for things of any type document. Click the "exclude subgroups" option. Any time you click on that smart group you'll see just the documents in that folder, nothing above, nothing below, and no subgroups will appear.

You can do that without creating a smart group by doing the same thing with the search bar. Selecting which group to search in is done by clicking the group in the sidebar/navigation pane.

If you want to preserve a manually set ordering in a smart group, there is a handy renumber script available that will prepend an index number to the name of each file so an alpha sort will be the same as a manual sort. The sort order in smart groups is always alpha.

The renumber script will also clean up after itself. You can tell it to add numbers, which will also recreate new index numbers, and you can tell it to remove the numbers it prepended.

Very pricey as an outliner, but also sort of a swiss army knife for document warehousing.

Lucine wrote:

@Jon, it's not really hoisting that I'm looking for, since Hoisting
shows the parent hierarchies for each "item" that I want to isolate. For
example, if I only want level 3 items from each tree, then it would show
me level 1 + level 2+ level 3 for Item 1, then the same 3 levels for
item 2, and so on. Whereas I was looking to isolate ONLY items of level
3 and not have levels 1 and 2 be visible.

Lucine wrote:

Dr. Andus, YES thank you so much for this suggestion! This software
seems INCREDIBLY powerful. I am getting "software high" from seeing the
idea so well-implemented :D

I have to warn you though that this is quite an old software and it does have some bugs where the software crashes and you lose unsaved data (it was already happening on Win7, I have no idea how well it runs on Win10 or Win11).

I haven't used it for a while, but when I was using it, I was able to isolate those bugs (essentially had to do with choosing some pull-down menu functions under certain conditions that made the software crash, and found the timeline view generally unstable) and so I learnt to avoid triggering them.

But it is a good idea to hit CTRL+S regularly, to avoid data loss.

Also, I wouldn't pay full price for it. The seller has promotions for it several times a year (I see that right now they are selling it at USD$54.95, instead of the usual $99.95).

I mean it is an amazing piece of software, one of the most creative outliners I've ever seen, but you have to accept that it will never be updated and can crash on you regularly.

Jon Polish wrote:

(...) I think InfoQube can be set to do this, although Pierre would have to advise.

Hi Jon,

In IQ, you can indeed combine Hoist and Context Parents (set it to Off) to only show items of a given level

Interestingly, a specific command to select all items of a given level was never added. To do it, you can use the select sub-items command 1 or more times to achieve the same thing.

This is now being added:
- New: Grid: New Item >Select Siblings and Select Level commands. Both commands support multiple selections

With this new command, it is now just a 2 step process:
1- Select Level
2- Hoist. To show Hoisted items in a new instance of the grid, use Hoist Special...

Pierre Paul Landry
IQ Designer
https://www.infoqube.biz/Home

Dr Andus wrote:

but you have to accept that it will never be
updated and can crash on you regularly.

Well, maybe that was a bit harsh, I should have said "occasionally", rather than "regularly". It would be regular if you keep triggering the same bug, but once you learn what triggers it, you can avoid it. Frequent CTRL+S is the insurance policy.

You're a Magic Bunny, Pierre! Very impressive!

Pierre Paul Landry wrote:

Jon Polish wrote:
(...) I think InfoQube can be set to do this, although Pierre would have
to advise.

Hi Jon,

In IQ, you can indeed combine Hoist and Context Parents (set it to Off)
to only show items of a given level

Interestingly, a specific command to select all items of a given level
was never added. To do it, you can use the select sub-items command 1 or
more times to achieve the same thing.

This is now being added:
- New: Grid: New Item >Select Siblings and Select Level commands. Both
commands support multiple selections

With this new command, it is now just a 2 step process:
1- Select Level
2- Hoist. To show Hoisted items in a new instance of the grid, use Hoist
Special...

Pierre Paul Landry
IQ Designer
https://www.infoqube.biz/Home

As Lucene already said, hoisting's not really an equivalent, technically speaking: all the more so since it HIDES the siblings, so it does the contrary of what you want in the end, from THAT point of view, but see below...

As Dr.Andus said, Outline4whatever is very old, and comes from a company which doesn't seem to want their other (Windows) software either, so that wouldn't be a good choice I think... and then, it's been very weird from start on...

Another Windows software that seems (!) to do what you want, in this respect (!), is InfoSelect (prohibitively priced, at 280 bucks plus VAT, and here again, no development I'm aware of, some quite some years... to put it mildly); recently, I had trialed IS somewhat, and I hadn't been impressed at all...

At the end of the day, what you really might want, is some distinction between your current project / case / interest / whatever, whilst "discarding" the "noise from above", and some Mac program(s?) indeed come with 2 tree/list panes, instead of just-one, and it's obvious that 3-pane outlining would the way to go, IF you had a real choice, so that beyond the 3-over-2 requirement, available offerings also could fulfill your other needs, which currently is not really the case, and Devonthink, in particular, did AWAY with their intermediate pane some time ago, pretending it "unsettled" (or whatever) their not-so-powery user base...

So, perhaps, the hoisting proposition above wasn't so much way-off, but might have met your real needs quite well... and then your software choice broadens quite remarkably, incl. Ultra Recall (where you have the advantage of a very "live" forum, combined with a responsive developer and rock-solid software, but that's just me; e.g. MyInfo 8 now might indeed be much better - robust, finally? - than when I tried it, in versions 5 and 6...) and many others.


Btw, another - just technically speaking that is! - 3-pane outliner is "TaskElf", a mere 20 bucks plus VAT, but TaskElf is allegedly the worst outliner, of ANY pane-count, there is: It comes with dozens of "columns" / "fields" (since it's the crippled-but-really-to-the-core offspring of "TaskMerlin", which is much better, and for which there even exists some groupware version), but you can NOT search/filter "by field" (in the intermediate pane), or then, "by project" (in the tree), just globally, and, of course, there is no "Boolean" search, no "and", "or", or "not" then, and "phrase search" is absent, too, as well as any search whatsoever within your current content-pane... and to say it all, within less than 10 minutes, and with just 3 or 4 items, I "succeeded" in getting an extended problem report ("Unhandled exception", oh yeah...), inviting me to close the program... I followed that advice then, but not without making, a storing, both a screenshot and the full text of the latter one, so as to never risk to get into into problems, with developers who are happy with their, in case ridiculous, programs, but not at all with real (!) reviews they get upon'em, and btw: just see "4 stars out of 5" for that joke of a program here: http://taskelf.findmysoft.com/ - such "reviews" are not only a joke, but an outrage, but since today's "journalism" is on par, quality-wise, nobody notices..., except me again: "TaskElf has been reviewed by George Norman on 10 Feb 2015. Based on the user interface, features and complexity, Findmysoft has rated TaskElf 4 out of 5 stars, naming it Excellent"; no further questions, Norman, your pardon, Georgie!

Have you looked at Legend? https://www.legendapp.com/

-Mike

So I found the name of the concept I was trying to describe: layering. Basically, I wanted each level to be a separate layer, but even that was inaccurate, what I wanted was multiple layers where each one has a different function. For example, one layer has comments I made on this day, another layer has comments I made on another day. And each layer can contain multiple lines of a single level, whereas before I had conceptualized it as 1 level = 1 line = 1 layer.

This is the software which works with layers and how I discovered the name for the concept:

https://scriptation.com/

Unfortunately it's only on Mac.

That's a pretty cool idea. I bet you could do something similar with Dataview in Obsidian, or with a map of content in almost anything.

The layers concept sounds a little like versioning, although I assume in scriptation you can re-edit any layer without having to fork like you would in a version control system.

I should repress this, but today I have a new hammer. Everything looks like a nail. Curio supports layers, but probably not like what you're looking for.

Objects (figures) exist on a layer. You can reorder the layers, set visibility, enable layer export, and layers can be merged, although not with a single command. Select a layer, command-A, command-X, select another layer, command-V. Then you can delete the now empty layer if you want.

Lucine wrote:

So I found the name of the concept I was trying to describe: layering.
Basically, I wanted each level to be a separate layer, but even that was
inaccurate, what I wanted was multiple layers where each one has a
different function. For example, one layer has comments I made on this
day, another layer has comments I made on another day. And each layer
can contain multiple lines of a single level, whereas before I had
conceptualized it as 1 level = 1 line = 1 layer.

This is the software which works with layers and how I discovered the
name for the concept:

https://scriptation.com/

Unfortunately it's only on Mac.

It is a cool idea. And indeed, I suspect you could probably do it in Obsidian using various plugins (maybe Mark as well as Dataview).