That looks rather nice. What it's got, which unfortunately NO other outliners (I can think of, except maybe Atom with the FoldingText plugin) have, is a navigation tree with folders. That's a great idea, and one we've all been whingeing about for years.

Now what we really need is someone like the Omni Group - or perhaps OutlineEdit Robin (are you listening, Robin) - to come up with a cross-platform outliner that also does folders.

Yes, I'm excited by the impending 2.1 release of Ulysses (thanks, Paul), but even Ulysses doesn't have in-document folding. There are a couple of interesting iOS apps that do (Editorial, for example), but nothing cross-platform that I can think of.

Cheers,
Bill

MadAboutDana, I'm not sure I follow that.

By in-document folding do you just mean folding by level under headings? I've been using Haroopad cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, and Editorial on iOS) and it does that well. It lacks *navigation* by outline level (as in Markdownpad2, or Editorial), and it's also more difficult in Haroopad to *move* headers around (requiring copy and paste versus dedicated commands). Is that what you mean?

Hey Jaslar,

Sorry, let's take a closer look. By folding, yes, I mean sections can be folded up so they disappear. There are various ways of doing this, but the system used by FoldingText, HarooPad and smartdown is to allow marked-up headers (any header) to act as a node. FoldingText and smartdown both use a simple hierarchical system, whereby child headers are treated as part of the foldable section under a parent header - so if a single hash header is the parent, a double-hash header will be treated as a child. In turn, a triple-hash header under a double-hash header will be treated as the child of the latter. It's a neat solution and presumably relatively easy to implement in Markdown.

My point is that what very few - if any - Markdown editors have is a combination of a left-hand (conventionally) navigation bar with folders, plus documents that support folding in the actual text of the document. Even rich-text outliners rarely have this layout. FoldingText no longer has it, although amusingly, the much older and now apparently discontinued TaskPaper did have a fairly sophisticated navigation tree (not folders, but use of projects/subprojects to emulate folders) and although it didn't support folding, it did support hoisting. In fact, I find myself wishing somebody would pick TaskPaper back up again (there are a couple of excellent TaskPaper clones on iOS, but none on MacOS; there's one on Windows), because it was very powerful.

Anyway: folders and documents on left, document contents on right, foldable headings/headers inside document contents. And maybe even hoistable headings/headers. That's what I'd like to see!

Editorial now has its own version of TaskPaper, which I find incredibly handy. I got to looking at TaskPaper+ (you mentioned clones) which is for Windows, and is open source. But it requires me to set up Apache, PHP, MySQL. That seems like a lot of work just to test drive something. Has anybody else played around with the advantages of having a local web server? In theory, I can see that it would offer true platform independence. Worth going there?

Yes, Editorial's version of TaskPaper is cool – just wish there was a Mac version of Editorial!

The best Windows clone is TodoPaper (think it's been mentioned here before). It's not free, but it's very good.

The idea of a TaskPaper server definitely has its attractions, but been there, done that, find it rather tedious, especially for something like task management... ;-)

I think my ultimate outliner would be as follows:

1. Navigation tree with folders (Dropbox support on iOS)
2. Basic outliner features and interface
3. Uses text files as main file format, for portability/cross platform

I guess not everybody wants #3, but it would be easier for me because I don't have to worry about 5 months or 5 years from now. Sometimes I use a text editor, sometimes I want to outline, preferably I'd do both with the same app. I don't need a lot of the extras that Omni Outliner, etc., provide, so I think for a simple outliner plain text format is doable. Some metadata would be possible via hashtags or other indicators, that would still be legible in a plain text editor.

MadaboutDana wrote:

That looks rather nice. What it's got, which unfortunately NO other
outliners (I can think of, except maybe Atom with the FoldingText
plugin) have, is a navigation tree with folders. That's a great idea,
and one we've all been whingeing about for years.

Cheers,
Bill