I've just started a project to make a simple, clean outliner for Apple platforms. It is called Zavala and is in the very early stages of development.

I'm looking for users to provide feedback on what they would like to see in an outliner. If you've ever wished that you had a direct line to the developer of an outliner before it got released, this is your chance. I'm very interested in how people are using outliners and what features they need in the real world on a daily basis.

If you have macOS Big Sur, there is a developer release available to kick around. You wouldn't want to trust any important data to it, because it is under active development and might scramble your stuff completely. You can take a look and provide feedback as to what works and doesn't work for you. Even if you can't run the developer release, there is a forum for the project there. I'd still like to hear what you think makes a good outliner.

The project is open source and Zavala will always be free. I hope some of you join me in making an outliner that is a joy to use.

https://github.com/vincode-io/Zavala

Well, I must say that’s a very nice start on macOS – I’ve just had a quick play.

The most obvious missing function at the moment is search, but the layout is elegant, the approach is valid. I like the automatic strikethrough of tasks, and I very much like the notes.

I’ll take another look when I’ve got a little more time and make some suggestions. Search, for me, is one of the key functions, however (and search that looks inside folded paragraphs! There are a couple of outliners out there which don’t find text if it’s inside a folded section (notably Numbers, which has a rather good folding function); this is a disastrous shortcoming!

Good job! Keep it up.

Cheers,
Bill

Thanks for the kind words. I'm working on Search right now, so that should be in the next developer release.

How would you like to see search within collapsed rows working? Should it auto expand those rows when found?

Mm, good question.

For simplicity’s sake, I think automatic expansion would be best.

But there is another model, whereby the parent row would be highlighted (or “flashed”, or whatever one calls it in programming terms), so the user can drill down to the highlighted search term under the parent row.

Or there’s a third model, which is the filtering model, whereby all rows with the search term(s) in them would be isolated (i.e. all other rows would disappear), so you could click the one you’re looking for, whereupon the whole outline would reappear centred on the row you’ve focused on. Outlinely uses this model rather well, leaving the parent rows above the “hit” row in place, so you can see it in context.

Of these three options, I think option 3 is probably the best one, although it may be the trickiest to program (or not; IANAP!).

Highlighting is also, IMHO, a sine qua non: ideally, multiple search terms should each have a different highlight colour (assuming Boolean search is possible).

Them’s my views, anyway!

Very interesting project – keep up the good work.

I would like to see in an outliner what Brett Terpstra states in his blog when he wrote about the Tree app;

“An outliner is an outliner, but Tree adds one thing that makes it infinitely more useful to me and my non-linear thought process: a horizontal view of the outline. It’s basically a right-aligned mind map. Seeing each level of the hierarchy in line with other siblings across different branches suddenly brings the whole brainstorming thing together for me.”

https://brettterpstra.com/2012/04/02/app-review-tree-an-outliner-i-can-love/

There was a further discussion about this in these forums:

https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/9131

Maurice Parker wrote:

I've just started a project to make a simple, clean outliner for Apple
platforms. It is called Zavala and is in the very early stages of
development.

I'm looking for users to provide feedback on what they would like to see
in an outliner. If you've ever wished that you had a direct line to the
developer of an outliner before it got released, this is your chance.
I'm very interested in how people are using outliners and what features
they need in the real world on a daily basis.

If you have macOS Big Sur, there is a developer release available to
kick around. You wouldn't want to trust any important data to it,
because it is under active development and might scramble your stuff
completely. You can take a look and provide feedback as to what works
and doesn't work for you. Even if you can't run the developer release,
there is a forum for the project there. I'd still like to hear what you
think makes a good outliner.

The project is open source and Zavala will always be free. I hope some
of you join me in making an outliner that is a joy to use.

https://github.com/vincode-io/Zavala

I don’t have Big Sur installed. Is there anywhere that I can visit to see what the app looks like?

For what it’s worth though, I would like to applaud you for the detailed “Project Documents” that you have made available. It’s not something that I feel like I see often in the open source community.

I posted a screen shot for you of the most recent version that I'm working on.
https://github.com/vincode-io/Zavala/wiki/Screen-Shot

Love the new search function in V0.11.0 – bravo!

Although it is still a bit bare-bones: highlighting would be fave! Or failing that, a filter function (so only those items with the search terms in them appear in the list of results).

But it’s a big step forward!

P.S. I tried updating directly from Zavala, but got caught in a continuous loop; in the end I just downloaded the latest version from the GitHub site.

Cheers,
Bill

P.P.S. I’d suggest changing your screenshot to show some rich-text formatting – good from a marketing point of view (you’d be amazed how few people will notice the big B and I in the menu bar at the top of the screenshot).

Cheers,
Bill

P.P.P.S. Oh, and a few notes as well, just to show that it supports them. Incidentally, an icon for “note” would be good in the menu bar, too, for when one is working visually rather than directly from the keyboard.

I do plan to have a document search. When that is added it will be integrated with the list search so that when you select a searched for document the search terms in that document are highlighted.

Thanks for the advice about the screenshot. I'll update it when the app changes more.

Speaking of which, always keep any outlines you create in Zavala exported as OPML files. The next version of Zavala will break the database format and you'll lose anything you've put into it. I'm going to be converting the application to use tags for organizing instead of folders. The tag model will be similar to the one used in Vesper if you are familiar with that note taking application.

Oops! Thanks for the warning. I’ve only got test data in there at the moment, but it’s a nice outliner.

I've put out another release of Zavala. This is a pretty big release. It includes iCloud syncing and sharing. That means that if someone else has Zavala you can share and collaborate on Outlines in realtime with them.

iCloud syncing wouldn't be very much fun if Zavala was only on Macs, so this release also supports iOS. You can download Zavala for Mac and/or get the iOS version here: https://github.com/vincode-io/Zavala You'll find the info at the end of the User Contributions section.

I'm pretty sure that this is the last time that I will break backwards compatibility. You should still always back anything you want to keep to an OPML file. But, from here on out, I am going to make things smoother for testers of the app. I use it daily and hope that others start to do so too.

Good news, Maurice – I was going to report a fairly significant bug in version 13.0 (lost my data repository, couldn’t work out how to enter text since Zavala started insisting that you have to go through the “tag” field first), but the new version works well, and I’ve worked out the tag thing. In some respects, it’s actually good to be “forced” to go through the tag field before you start writing.

Tiny bug, or perhaps feature: when you click the up arrow, it moves the cursor up to the next item rather than to the next line. Ditto down arrow.

Excellent that it now supports iCloud, and I’m delighted to hear about the iOS app – I shall install forthwith!

Keep up the good work,
Bill

Maurice Parker wrote:

I've put out another release of Zavala. This is a pretty big release. It
includes iCloud syncing and sharing. That means that if someone else has
Zavala you can share and collaborate on Outlines in realtime with them.

iCloud syncing wouldn't be very much fun if Zavala was only on Macs, so
this release also supports iOS. You can download Zavala for Mac and/or
get the iOS version here: https://github.com/vincode-io/Zavala You'll
find the info at the end of the User Contributions section.

I'm pretty sure that this is the last time that I will break backwards
compatibility. You should still always back anything you want to keep to
an OPML file. But, from here on out, I am going to make things smoother
for testers of the app. I use it daily and hope that others start to do
so too.

Nice to see that Zavala supports nested tags – but folding of same would be even nicer! So rather than:

test
test/nested

you’d see:

test>

and then, after clicking on “test”:

test
test/nested
etc.

Same as Bear, NotePlan or Spaces.

The up/down arrow behavior is intended. It works differently when in notes though. Up/down goes to the line, but you have to hit esc to get out of the notes.

Zavala has graduated to its 1.0.0 Alpha release. This means that it has all the features that are planned for the 1.0 release, but that it still might be buggy. Might be? Who am I kidding? It has bugs in it. :-) The Alpha release is done to shake out any bugs I don't know about yet.

I built a new website for Zavala if you are curious about it but aren't sure about downloading it. https://zavala.vincode.io

While I was making the website I completely broke the update mechanism for the Mac version. You will have to download it manually from https://zavala.vincode.io/download I've gotten a report that the built-in update mechanism doesn't always work. If that has happened to you, I apologize. When the Mac app is released, it will be through the Mac App Store, so that shouldn't be a problem when we do the production release.

Zavala is a free, open source application and always will be. You should give it a shot.

Great work. Even if I don't use it myself, I'm glad to see it out in the world!

The one big wish I have for an outliner is a horizontal view. This has been discussed at length in various posts on this forum. For example,

https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/9131/0/tree-app--macos

A recent application that comes close and maybe in development is Dashwood;

https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/9324/0/dashword

Is this the kind of feedback you after @Maurice Parker?

Yes! That is exactly the kind of feedback I want.

I'll have to give it some thought though. I hadn't given any consideration to doing an horizontal view yet. I like it as a differential feature to what other outliners are doing.

I have quite a few traditional outline functions that I want to implement first. Hoisting and scripting/automation are at the top of my list right now. I don't expect that I would be able to implement a new big feature like this for at least another year.

A well done Horizontal Outliner would be an instant purchase for me. I suspect the feature is not easy to implement given the dearth of replacements after Tree's demise.

Zavala is a nice, rapidly evolving outliner – I’ve been playing with it for a couple of months now.

And there’s an iOS version, too!

Cheers,
Bill

Zavala is now in the App Store! Many thanks to all who provided feedback. Some of that feedback wasn't able to make it into v1.0, but I have several things that I plan to include in v1.1.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/zavala/id1546457750

Great work!

Nice. I downloaded it and played with it a bit.

A couple of requests:

Indenting/outdenting into a new line: When I outline I constantly make new indent nodes and then outdent again. With the outliners I use there's always a keyboard command to make a new indent/outdent from the line I'm on, but Zavala requires you go an extra step (which can get tiresome) and requires the creation of a new sister node which can then be indented/outdented.

Font/size options.