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askSam vs. Zoot? and vs. others
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Posted by Tomasz Raburski
Oct 10, 2013 at 01:25 PM
But can change the pre-defined keyboard shortcuts? As long as I remember, they collide with the diacritic key combinations”
Posted by Leib Moscovitz
Oct 10, 2013 at 01:45 PM
That I don’t know - you have to give it a try.
Posted by 22111
Oct 10, 2013 at 02:45 PM
Armin, thank you very much for your broad info! So they have made the layout flexible, and I’m very intrigued now, will trial and probably buy before the help file is really ready (I know you can do away with the white-on-black-background, so that should not be a problem for anybody).
In fact, 3-pane outliners are a kind of their own, and they are rare. So in UR, I “learned” to do without the third pane, but it will be more than interesting to “learn” how to best use the third pane; from the outside, by not having tried yet, I would say that it could be very useful to put clones of “other” sub-trees into the current sub-tree in pane 1, then have the items of the current item (in pane 1) in pane 2, and then you switch freely between your pane-1 headings, within the current sub-tree there, and independently of them being “at home” there or just being cloned to that position in the tree.
This way, quite fluent navigation between many such “item groups” (pane 2) all put together in pane 1 should be possible, and one click there (in pane 1) will bring you immediate access to all the respective “children”. I think that workflow-wise, this 3-pane is the greatest concept of them all, and perhaps it’s really time to switch the outliner. (Previous version had no formatting, and even a 32k limit for the content field: Since all this has gone, no further reason to avoid this program!) And I think the developer is right to never put it into “bits”, since thus, no deprecation, and no unnecessary waiting for the right moment to buy (and 100 p.c. to the developer, not 25 p.c. only).
One general question about type encoding: If I understand the problem right (which I never really dived into): If you write in some West European language, no problem. Eastern European ditto? But problems for Chinese, Arabic, Farsi, and so on?! Then, some problems if you import websites, even with special West European language characters sometimes? What about the trick to install the right font? On most computers, the “new” Arial font is installed, the one with many hundreds of characters. I suppose with that, you will not encounter any/too many font problems? And then, even Surfulater, the “specialist” for storing web sites, does not follow those new guidelines (Unicode I mean)... but perhaps it will be of interest indeed how well it processes European web sites…
A word about shortkeys, and badly assigned, not re-assignable shortkeys: I never encountered any program which I could not spice a little bit up with a macro program, so everybody should install the macro program of his choice, anyway. From there on, it’s easy to reassign original, unalterable shortkeys of any program to begin with, as your very first “macros” there. Just trial the macro program(s) before, since some of them are unable to re-assign such original shortkeys of a program, they do not intercept your key pressings early enough. But most will do without any problem. I know from bits comments and other sources that many a people do make rely their decision for or against a given software on that software’s shortkeys being re-assignable or not, when in fact, that minor criterion should not interfere here. In ancient age, good software had its own macro “language”/set; except for MS, this has largely be abandoned. So choose your macro tool, and then spice up your multiple applications, AND reassign better shortkeys with it, too!
Posted by Armin
Oct 10, 2013 at 04:26 PM
Tomasz Raburski wrote:
But can change the pre-defined keyboard shortcuts? As long as I
>remember, they collide with the diacritic key combinations”
You cannot create user-defined keyboard shortcuts, but you can disable most of the pre-defined keyboard shortcuts (In Zoot called “System Hotkeys”). There were some Zoot hotkeys, which collide with other software like Citavi (reference manager), so I disabled them in Zoot, because I didn’t find any option to change them in Citavi.
Using a German keyboard with Zoot, I had recently problems with the EUR-sign (”€”) (CTRL+ALT+E), but they have gone now.
In the earlier days of Zoot 6 I had some problems with E-Mails containing German umlauts (”öüä”), which Zoot did not handle correctly (esp. because of the variety of modes : plain text, HTML, content with images, content without images. Maybe my complaints about wrong umlauts and the developer’s effort to solve that problem were one reason, that he did not find time for the documentation. (ha- ha!)
22111 wrote:
>What about the trick to install the right font?
This is also something, which I am interested in. Any hints?
Regards
Armin
Posted by 22111
Oct 11, 2013 at 01:17 PM
“I had some problems with E-Mails containing German umlauts (”öüä”)” - That’s what I mean, problem solving for “internal” content is not also problem solving for imported third-party content, and it goes without saying that for European people, receiving most of this external content with “problem” characters, there should not be persistent problems since reading messages would become too strenuous an experience.
As for macro tools to overcome bad key assignments, I should have added that today, many macro programs have “application scope”, and you would need some of these: So in Word, the same key F9 would trigger this command, and in your outliner, it would trigger another command; they distinguis this “scope” by parts of the “caption”, being “Microsoft Word”, “UltraRecall”, and so on. So this would be an important factor of choice for your macro tool, together with its ability to override “internal” key combinations. Perhaps a third criterion: Some, bad, macro programs do only let you assign key combinations, but not simple keys, so that would impose control-F9, instead of letting you assign F9, and of course, nobody would want such a tool. Let me add that such functionality is available without scripting/“programming” whatsoever; of course, if you are willing to get into scripting, your possibilities will multiply, and for free, both with AutoIt or AHK. But reassigning keys to unwanted and aleatoric key combinations is just a question of simple macro tools for 10, 20 or 30 dollars.
Btw, in another thread, “10,000 messages in a single Outlook folder”: that’s another real strong argument for doing your crm and such in Zoot! (If it’s easy to shift any message from the inbox to what you’re working on, but I hope it is: the mail inbox should be an extra pane, from which then you should be able to “shift selected item from there as a sibling into the current pane-2 group”, by one key (which would be equivalent to “shift it as a child to the selected item in pane 1”).)