GrandView for Windows v1
~ assembled by :Dee ~

I have put together a version of GrandView 2.0 for DOS that is completely portable, fully functional, and ready to run on any modern version of Windows, using vDos-lfn, a variant of the excellent DOS emulator vDos.*

Although GrandView predates the World Wide Web, it had sophisticated capabilities for its time, including extensive mouse support, multiple document windows, inter-document links, item "clones," and date and category assignment, in addition to its powerful outlining features. Its demise is regretted by many to this day.

Installation Instructions

1. Download the "GrandViewForWinV1.zip" file here:
http://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0B8ucGNNvTCmSYzdRUjlJS2g3ZTQ

2. Unblock the downloaded zip file: Right-click it, select Properties, and click the "Unblock" button. This prevents Windows from giving a security warning when you run GrandView.

3. Extract the zip file. By default, Windows will extract it to a folder named GrandViewForWinV1, which can be renamed if desired. I will refer to it as the program folder.

4. In the program folder, run the "GrandView Shortcut Creator.vbs", which will create a shortcut called "GrandView" to run the program.
(If you prefer to create a shortcut manually, set its target to "vDos-lfn.exe" in the vDos-lfn subfolder, and - this is important - set it to "start in" the GV subfolder.)

5. Read the "README.pdf" to get started.

The program folder is only 13 MB in size, and leaves no files or registry entries anywhere else on your computer. It can be uninstalled by simply deleting it (after exporting any GrandView documents you want to save).


Acknowledgements

*A big thank you to Jos Schaars for developing vDos (https://www.vdos.info and to Wengier Wu for creating vDos-lfn (https://sourceforge.net/p/vdos/discussion/modifiedvdos/thread/270c9f18 a variant of vDos which is more compatible with GrandView.

(In vDos, some keyboard shortcuts don't work, such as Shift + arrow keys to move outline items, and the right Alt + letter keys. vDos-lfn adds keyboard IRQ1/INT9 support, which enables almost all of GrandView's keyboard shortcuts.)

vDos is free for personal use, but if you continue to use it, I encourage you to purchase a license or make a donation (https://www.vdos.info/register.html If vDos detects a network connection (e.g. on a business computer), it will occasionally display the "About" dialog box.

Also, a big thank you to Jim W. and Daniel G., who scanned and shared the GrandView 2.0 Reference Guide (http://tech.kateva.org/2014/02/grandview-outliner-and-information.html which, at 736 pages and searchable, was surely a labor of love. :)

Dedicated to all those who sing the praises of GrandView.
~ Let the fun begin! ~

:Dee

Also, for your peace of mind, I submitted the above "GrandViewForWinV1.zip" download link to VirusTotal, Google's online virus scanning service.

The report is here:
https://www.virustotal.com/latest-scan/http://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0B8ucGNNvTCmSYzdRUjlJS2g3ZTQ

Click on "Go to downloaded file analysis" to see the results of the virus scan on the file itself, which passed 55 different virus scans.

You can browse the contents of the "GrandViewForWinV1.zip" file on Google Drive here:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8ucGNNvTCmSYzdRUjlJS2g3ZTQ

:Dee

Fantastic! Now how about creating a "Grandview for Mac". :)

If anyone manages to get this up and running, would you mind sharing some screenshots?

Bob Spies wrote:

Fantastic! Now how about creating a "Grandview for Mac". :)

Sorry, can't help with that ... but there are ways to run Windows programs on Macs, no?

(In which case you'd be running GrandView in a DOS emulator in a Windows emulator on a Mac!)

Dr Andus wrote:

If anyone manages to get this up and running, would you mind sharing some screenshots?

I've uploaded some screenshots here:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8ucGNNvTCmSTk1adlY2LUdfV2c

If there's something specific you would like to see, let me know.

Hope this helps :)

Bob Spies wrote:

Fantastic! Now how about creating a "Grandview for Mac". :)

You could try to figure out a way to get More (http://outliners.scripting.com/more31.html to work. As I understand, GrandView was the DOS version of More.

Dee wrote:

I've uploaded some screenshots here:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8ucGNNvTCmSTk1adlY2LUdfV2c&gt
If there's something specific you would like to see, let me know.

Hi Dee,

many thanks for that! If it's not too much trouble, I was wondering what GrandView looks like in its most distraction-free writing mode (i.e. least amount of functions, commands etc. showing on the screen, such as when you zoom in to write a particular section of an outline).

I'm just wondering if this setup could be an alternative to getting involved with Org-mode (for the ability to zoom in and out of outline levels for distraction-free writing).

Dr Andus wrote:

Hi Dee,

many thanks for that! If it's not too much trouble, I was wondering what
GrandView looks like in its most distraction-free writing mode (i.e.
least amount of functions, commands etc. showing on the screen, such as
when you zoom in to write a particular section of an outline).

I'm just wondering if this setup could be an alternative to getting
involved with Org-mode (for the ability to zoom in and out of outline
levels for distraction-free writing).

Done :)

I uploaded some new screenshots to the same folder:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8ucGNNvTCmSTk1adlY2LUdfV2c

Screenshot 4 shows a distraction-free view.

Other screenshots show clones, hoisting, a calendar view, and how to use the Windows clipboard with GrandView.

My biggest gripe with GrandView is the lack of undo, which I use constantly in other apps. At the same time, I'm having a *lot* of fun with GrandView, so I'm not giving up yet. If I look at it philosophically, maybe a lack of undo is a *good* thing: it forces me to be bold and decisive -- to commit! ;)

I was able to install and run Grandview on Mac using Boxer http://boxerapp.com/

Several years ago I posted some screenshots of Grandview running on my Mac:

https://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/grandview/

Steve Z.

Dee and Steve - many thanks for all the screenshots!

Very nice! I'd forgotten how great this program was and your implementation has basically brought it up to today's standards.

Thanks for your efforts

Wow--and I thought I was joking about the Mac.

Steve--I love your last sentence in that post:

"All I can do is imagine how terrific this application would be if developed today with the same imagination, consideration for the end user, and innovation."

I couldn't agree more.

Listerene wrote:

Very nice! I'd forgotten how great this program was and your
implementation has basically brought it up to today's standards.

Thanks for your efforts

You're most welcome. :)

I shared it because I know there are people who still use GrandView today, others who can't but wish they could, and still others who would like to try it.

Besides, if it's easy to try it out, maybe someone will take an interest in developing a modern successor.

Hope springs eternal ;)

This is a great site and I, as a Crimper, have read it for years.

I used Grandview for many years Lastly I used it on a XP laptop and before that on an NT desktop system. . I have dos GV on my Win 8.1 desktop drive but it will not execute to a full screen and is not readable to copy my files or create files.

I think your GV 1 for windows is a great idea. Thank you. I downloaded and unzipped and unblocked as instructed but when executed GV for windows the screen came up with a note from windows that GV could not operate at full screen (it was the same tiny size). It would not go full screen and the screen was still too small to work with.

Perhaps it was because I loaded it in the wrong folder or because I had my old dos GV on a second drive and the system decided it was the same as the new version.

When you execute your GV for windows is it confined to a small screen? Any advise as to what drive and folder to load with this new GV for windows? I will also try removing the dos GV from the other drive.

Again thanks so much for your work. I will be thrilled if I can use GV once again and also convert my existing files.

Dee, I just wanted to thank you so much for your work to make GrandView available again. That software helped me write research papers and organize materials for many years and I have truly missed it. Its value comes from letting me enter many ideas, topics to cover, facts to include, etc. in whatever order comes to mind. (Almost like brainstorming.) After getting everything down, GV allows me to quickly organize topics hierarchically and come up with a logical grouping and order of presentation. Then this structure naturally becomes a series of sentences, with topics developed in the correct order. I wish my mind worked in this way to begin with, but it does not.

Your software development effort I greatly appreciate. This was clearly not a couple of hours of work and your generosity in sharing the results with the rest of the world needs to be recognized. Please know that you have significantly helped one person for certain, and surely thousands of others who were fortunate enough to be around when IBM/MS DOS was introduced and enjoyed the creative efforts required to be productive when 64K of RAM was an upgrade and applications had to be efficient and useful. (I got hooked originally on ThinkTank.)

[Now my work involves solving problems on adiabatic quantum annealing computers, where the state of the art is reminiscent of computing in the 1950s.]

Thank you again, Dee, for making life better for many of us,
D Barr

GV Fanatic:

I apologize for not seeing your message until now. I don't check this site very often.

I have Windows 10 with a display resolution of 1920 x 1080, and my GrandView window is large and clear, filling 85% of the height of my display.

You can make the window bigger by pressing [Win]+F12, and make it smaller by pressing [Win]+F11.

You can also switch to and from a semi-fullscreen mode by pressing [Alt][Enter].

These and more keyboard shortcuts and other hints can be found in the "vDos Getting Started" PDF file in the "vDos-lfn" folder.

If that doesn't work, you could try setting up a different version of vDos or vDosPlus. See http://vdosplus.org for more info.

I hope that helps.


DBarr:

Thank you for your kind and generous words. It is gratifying to know it is being used and appreciated. :)

How cool! After spending a whole day over the weekend with Linux running DOSBOX, PC-Outline, and KAMAS, I am unsurprised to say that everything in this GV file works fine with this setup, too. including shift keys. DOS outliners in Linux!

And I see in GV that there's an "undo last delete," which is not quite the same thing as a general Undo button, but it's helpful!

I even figured out how to make the DOS outliners go full screen. Grandview is remarkable. @Stephen Zeoli, you wrote than you could display the documents "inline" -- but how? It seems like this would be under Layout, but that option wasn't clear to me. Tips?

So I spent a few hours last night messing with DOS outliners on Linux. Thinktank, KAMAS, PC-Outline, Grandview. Kind of a history of outlining in the DOS world. Grandview is clearly WAY better than PC-Outline, which makes sense, since it was an iteration by the same developer (John Friend).

I admit that there's a deep attraction to going back to these remarkably focused, elegant, and powerful apps. They wind up, in a full screen mode, being a true distraction-free thinking space. On the other hand, good outlining requires access to other info. While it's not hard to jump out of the dosbox-x environment to grab a contract, a bit of info on the web, or whatever, getting that information back into the emulated outliner is a problem. It's possible to export/import in both directions. But it's work. Those old programs just weren't designed for graphical interfaces and the Internet.

Is Friend still around? I wonder what he uses these days.

At any rate, I marvel that I can use a 7 year old computer, running Ubuntu 18.04 (free), and in literally minutes, set up and run these classic programs, also for free. Computing is so much cheaper and more versatile than it used to be.

My question: besides our PC-Outline user, who continues to actively use old programs in emulation? And how do you integrate your work?

>My question: besides our PC-Outline user, who continues to actively use old programs in emulation? And how do you integrate your work?

Hello,

I discovered Grandview a few months ago and I'm still learning the ropes, but I think it's a amazing program : lightning fast, user-friendly despite all the features and easily portable. And the manual is a work of art !

For the moment, I use it for to-do lists, management of some personal projects (I use the opensource software Kanboard for team projects), brainstorming and drafting. I sometimes write in Wordperfect 5.1, which I also started to use recently, and can easily share text between the two programs. When I need to export a GV file, I just convert it to the wordperfect format, which LibreOffice can open. Along with Mindforger, a great free and opensource notebook, Grandview has replaced Scrivener for my writing projects.

As I'm on Linux (Debian and Centos), I use DOSEMU2 instead of VDOS. You'll need to compile DOSEMU2 if you are not in Ubuntu (there is a PPA) and it's not very well documented, but it's an excellent emulator : the small graphical glitches and mouse problems that I had with DOSBOX are gone. It's also much faster than DOSBOX in my experience, which is important when you have a older computer. The DOS drive is mounted on a nextcloud folder : the files are so tiny that they are very quick to sync, even with a slow connection.

A belated correction: I have been using dosbox-x (rather than dosbox)-- which seems to be far more accommodating to these old outliners, and also for toggling to full screen (first choose output>opengl, then adjust for aspect, then full screen).

A shout out again to @Stephen Z--I couldn't figure out the trick to displaying documents in the main screen. How do you do that?

Dee
THANK YOU! GREAT JOB! Sorry, I don't usually yell...
I fell in love with Grandview in the mid 1980s and used it extensively until the mid-1990s. I used Categories extensively and really missed them after it became clear it was not going to be ported to Windows. Great way to organize information in multiple dimensions!

The only issue I had was the download link from google docs didn't seem to work in Chrome, so I switched over to MS Edge, and it downloaded fine.
I didn't realize your download provides a copy of vDos-lfn, so I had already downloaded DOSBOX-x. It seem to work will that emulator, but I used your shortcut creator, and now have an icon on my Desktop. I then copied the folders I had with GV files to the USER folder and was able to access them easily.
I still have hundreds of .gv files, and have just revisited them with your tool for the first time in 25 years! I was able to select all of the text from a document and export it as space delimited ASCII - Wonderful!

Thanks again, Don Smith
Software developer, customer support engineer and instructor during my 'working' career in Silicon Valley
Community College Computer Science Professor for the last 20 years (now partially retired)

The previous links I provided for "GrandView for Windows v1" are no longer valid because of the recent Google Drive security update.

Here are the updated links:

GrandViewForWinV1.zip
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8ucGNNvTCmSYzdRUjlJS2g3ZTQ/view?resourcekey=0-5FS5a9WwP96ODPgV7AfOAQ

Screenshots
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B8ucGNNvTCmSTk1adlY2LUdfV2c?resourcekey=0-R_GVOLbQY6YIqXsh9prVrQ

:Dee

GrandView was my first outliner way back in 1989. On a 386 IIRC.

Fantastic piece of software. Searched for a replacement for years. Ended up running it in Dox Box about 15 (?) years ago but needed a tool like this on all of my devices. So I ended up adopting Workflowy (terrible name) when it first came out.

Not the same as GrandView but darn close, and I have it on all of my devices. it's in the "good enough" category, and I have been using it at least 10 years and it has not gone out of business :-). Plus they auto backup your data to your drop box account so a little bit of insurance.

Thanks
Hunter