Forum Posts Feed
CrossLine - an outliner with cross-link capabilities in the tradition of Ecco Pro
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Posted by cicerosc
Nov 4, 2018 at 12:03 PM
And I second Chris Murtland’s question - I can’t figure out how transcluding of the grey text in your sample outline works either.
Posted by Rochus
Nov 4, 2018 at 12:39 PM
Welcome; I appreciate your feedback. As long as I’m using CrossLine myself (it takes at least another ten years till retirement) I will do regular maintenance work; new features depend on my need; but since the source code is available everyone can implement features in principle; I’m aware though that using the source is not trivial and takes some time to familiarize.
Concerning button and menu bars: all my applications do without menu and button bars because I want to use all available screen space for information display; when I create a new repository I usually press F11 to even get rid of the window title bar.
Concerning columns: I admit that I missed them a couple of times, but there was always a work around and implementing columns in CrossLine would be a more than linear growth in needed user interface and backend functions; and it would waste screen space due to necessary headers, and screen updates would probably slow down, etc.; that’s why I was reluctant to implement them.
cicerosc wrote:
Wow this is great! Thank you! This is one of the best implementations
>of an outline-focused Ecco alternative I have ever seen. I hope you
>will continue developing or that someone else will fork. Would be nice
>to have some type of button bar. No doubt columns would be much harder
>to implement, but even as is this looks like a great outliner. Thank
>you again!
Posted by Rochus
Nov 4, 2018 at 12:53 PM
cicerosc wrote:
Two more comments:
>2) I don’t see a way to select and then copy/paste text across multiple
>items. Unless I am missing something you can drag to select text within
>ONE item, or you can select multiple items by clicking on their outline
>number (but only to a limited degree within one top-level header), but
>you can’t freely start in the middle of one item and drag the cursor
>across multiple items to select only the exact text you want, as you can
>in Ecco. Hopefully I am missing something there as the ability to cut
>and paste sections of an outline into emails and other programs is
>something I use a lot.
No, your’re right; I’m sorry CrossLine doesn’t support selecting text parts over multiple items; you can either select one or more whole items using the handle section on the left side or you can select text within one item. But you can export an outline to HTML and then make in the browser whatever selection is supported there. I actually implemented my own email client which directly integrates outlines and supports linking email messages from CrossLine; I intend to also open-source this application in near future.
Posted by Rochus
Nov 12, 2018 at 02:04 PM
>cicerosc wrote:
>Two more comments:
>
>>2) I don’t see a way to select and then copy/paste text across multiple
>>items. Unless I am missing something you can drag to select text within
>>ONE item, or you can select multiple items by clicking on their outline
>>number (but only to a limited degree within one top-level header), but
>>you can’t freely start in the middle of one item and drag the cursor
>>across multiple items to select only the exact text you want, as you can in Ecco
I actually had a misconception concerning your question and how it is implmented in Ecco. After trying in Ecco I have to correct my previous response.
Ecco too does not support partial text selection over more than one item. As soon as the mouse cursor leaves the item while dragging the whole previous item is selected, so Ecco silently switches between text and item selection. In contrast to CrossLine Ecco supports arbitrary item selections; this is a bit dangerous because you can do a selection which by itself violates the outline constraints. CrossLine therefore corrects selections so only items of the same level (and thus all items below) are selected. You can Copy/Paste the selection to a text processor and get a corresponding representation of the selected items with tab indentations for subitems.