I do a lot of writing in markdown, but usually they are shorter pieces. I draft my prose in vim and can get by with each piece being it's own file.

However, I'm working on a much larger book-sized project and I'm wanting to see my markdown headings in a collapsible tree format. Vim's headline folding is ugly at best and not two pane. I will still use vim for drafting, but I need something more flexible for the editing portion which will allow me to zoom around the project and maintain a high level overview.

So far I've played with Write Monkey and Caret, and while both are nice and can give me that two pane outliner look but neither can collapse the headlines on the navigation pane which leads to far too much information being displayed.

Hoping one of you fine people here will be able to suggest something to me, otherwise I'm going to have to abandon my plain-text workflow which would really stink. Having to abandon plain text files means having to abandon vim which I truly do not want to do.

I'm on windows. Thanks for your help!

Give Write a look. It can show the structure of your work in the left hand pane when you are using their cloud service to sync and store files (you can also choose to store files locally, but doesn't show the "outline.")

https://writeapp.co

Steve Z.

I can recommend Write - it's very well designed, and has an attractive stay-on-top option that makes it ideal for research (I wish more apps had a stay-on-top option, in fact). Combined with auto-wordcount and a rather neat little right-margin graphic which shows you precisely where you are in a document, it's one of the better authoring apps.

On the other hand, you could opt (if you use Mac) for something optimised for long documents - and with an exceptionally good outline view - such as Mellel. But you're a text person, so Write would be a good bet.

Just be aware that there are a lot of Mac apps called "Write"; the one Steve and I are talking about is indeed writeapp.co

Cheers,
Bill

But Write doesn't satisfy the request, does it? If offers a navigational guide, but you can't collapse the sections on the left hand pane,or change their order. The only plain text app I know of that can do that can do two pane outlining is org-mode, and that requires splitting the buffer. It can be done, but there's a learning curve. I use Notecase Pro (or Treepad) quite happily on several platforms. But it's not plain text.

MadaboutDana wrote:

On the other hand, you could opt (if you use Mac) for something
optimised for long documents - and with an exceptionally good outline
view - such as Mellel.

He says he's on Windows...

I'd simply suggest making your headings their own sections, which can be viewed in a hierarchical left pane (and thus can easily be rearranged) in a number of Markdown-compatible apps you can buy (Scrivener for Windows comes to mind for $40, though apps like qownnotes.org or the Atom text editor are free) or subscribe to (inkdrop.info is $5/month)

If you are using Vim you can try the :TOC command of the vim-pandoc plugin (https://github.com/vim-pandoc/vim-pandoc that will give you a split-tree of the headings on the left or the VOom plugin (https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2657 that will give you a full two pane outliner with the capability of rearranging the headings. Both understand very well the markdown syntax and if you work with markdown pandoc and the related plugin are really useful anyway.

Satis, that just opened a whole *box* of CRIMPING. So let me make sure I understand this. qownnotes DOES allow the rearranging of notes in the hierarchy pane? And it runs on Windows, Mac, Android, and has a web client? This sounds like the whole package! Ubiquitous platforms, open source, plain text markdown, and outlining. I had never heard of it. And ownCloud might be another answer (versus the encrypted StandardNotes I was looking at).

I love this site.

satis wrote:

I'd simply suggest making your headings their own sections, which can be
viewed in a hierarchical left pane (and thus can easily be rearranged)
in a number of Markdown-compatible apps you can buy (Scrivener for
Windows comes to mind for $40, though apps like qownnotes.org or the
Atom text editor are free) or subscribe to (inkdrop.info is $5/month)

Huh - great suggestions in here. Never heard of Quownnotes, looks pretty cool.

After some more research on my own, I'm surprised to say that it actually seems like Microsoft Word (with the Writage plugin) is going to be the most efficient and powerful at the moment. I can painlessly copy and paste between vim and word, and word has some fairly robust outlining capabilities.

thouqht wrote:

After some more research on my own, I'm surprised to say that it
actually seems like Microsoft Word (with the Writage plugin) is going to
be the most efficient and powerful at the moment. I can painlessly copy
and paste between vim and word, and word has some fairly robust
outlining capabilities.

Thanks for pointing out Writage. A nice and practical plugin that makes Word more useful for me.

I quite like the look of Writage, but can't use it because Windows only.

On the other hand, Markdown editors like TextNut and more recently, Strike (still in beta) and others (sorry, lost the name of the obvious candidate here; it'll come back to me just as soon as I press "post" ;-)) do a very good job of concealing the Markdown code from those who prefer not to see it.

And besides: why would you use Word as a Markdown front end!?!?

Sorry, Jaslar, just noticed this: yes, you can collapse the sections in the left-hand pane, and you can also collapse text under headings in the actual document.

You can't change the order of stuff in the left-hand pane, however. Which is something I write to unfortunate developers about on a regular basis...

jaslar wrote:

But Write doesn't satisfy the request, does it? If offers a navigational
guide, but you can't collapse the sections on the left hand pane,or
change their order. The only plain text app I know of that can do that
can do two pane outlining is org-mode, and that requires splitting the
buffer. It can be done, but there's a learning curve. I use Notecase Pro
(or Treepad) quite happily on several platforms. But it's not plain
text.

MadaboutDana wrote:

And besides: why would you use Word as a Markdown front end!?!?

If you asked me: I usually do not need to produce MD files. So it does not make sense to get and learn to use a dedicated Markdown editor. I am used to working in Word because I often have to use it (for client projects). So, being able to export MD files from Word is a big advantage for me.

And besides: why would you use Word as a Markdown front end!?!?

It's more that I'm using Word as an end point. I need to collaboratively edit and format a large document. I prefer to write in markdown, but collaborative editing options in markdown are tough unless your team is comfortable using github (which outside of a tech field is not going to happen).

Appreciate the information. I'll take a closer look at it. Using the left pane for outline-like reordering would be close to perfect. But I should be looking into the ownCloud for security reasons, too.

MadaboutDana wrote:

Sorry, Jaslar, just noticed this: yes, you can collapse the sections in
the left-hand pane, and you can also collapse text under headings in the
actual document.

You can't change the order of stuff in the left-hand pane, however.
Which is something I write to unfortunate developers about on a regular
basis...

jaslar wrote:

Appreciate the information. I'll take a closer look at it. Using the
left pane for outline-like reordering would be close to perfect.

FYI I was browsing the Mac App Store and came upon a $3.99 Markdown app I wasn't familiar with that does outline left-pane reordering - OutlineText:

https://hibara.org/software/outlinetext/

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/outlinetext-outliner-of-a-text-file-with-markdown/id1202735151?mt=12

He apparently reused the code for a Windows app with a different name:

http://markdown-editor.software.informer.com/

Only has two (bad) reviews on the Mac App Store, but those reviews were posted before the last update (last summer). Caveat emptor, then.

Well, THAT'S interesting. Let's hope that this particular feature (ability to reorder left pane sections) becomes the next competition for markdown editors.

l-d-l wrote:

If you are using Vim you can try the :TOC command of the vim-pandoc
plugin (https://github.com/vim-pandoc/vim-pandoc that will give you a
split-tree of the headings on the left or the VOom plugin
(https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2657 that will give
you a full two pane outliner with the capability of rearranging the
headings. Both understand very well the markdown syntax and if you work
with markdown pandoc and the related plugin are really useful anyway.

I loaded up VOoM… wow. This can be seriously handy for my non-fiction writing.

Some useful lines to add to your .vimrc if you're going to try VOoM:

" override syntax selection for Markdown extensions
autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.md set syntax=markdown
autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.mmd set syntax=markdown

" VOoM settings
let g:voom_ft_modes = {'markdown': 'pandoc'}

The latter one makes pandoc the default syntax if you have a Markdown file open, so you can just type :Voom and get on with things.