Outliners
From UoWiki
There are lots of these around.
- WARNING
- outliners will waste your time when you're mean to be getting on with something. Try beginning to choose an outliner when you don't have a deadline the next day.
An outliner is a text / list editing tool that generally seems to work by allowing you to structure a document by headings and subheadings. Some offer simple navigational structures that give 'diagram' views of structures, some just offer hierarchical to-do list type views. The basic function seems to be to structure text, and allow the structure to be filled out and often interlinked.
From my initial researches, nobody seems to have cracked the following problems (I'd be really interested if this is wrong, please add updates):
- how they should work from a user-interface perspective (of course there are conventions, but not so solid as, say, graphical email clients or word processors).
- what universal format they should use. (opml seems like a good attempt though).
- how to exchange them between applications and platforms.
- integration with wikis
[edit] Software Picks
my unfulfilled (by any one tool) criteria/wishlist are:
- command line operation for remote usage
- multi-platform capability
- some attempt at exchange and universal format (ie. opml)
- graphing option
- linking option
- use of vim to do the editing of text
- outputs and some kind of versioning system
- integration with wiki
The list so far:
- vimoutliner: - http://vimoutliner.org/ I'm using this regularly. it's good, so far.
- Buzz: - http://buzz.sourceforge.net/activebuzz.html
- hnb: - http://hnb.sourceforge.net/ (still possibly best so far but oh if only we had vimkeys.).
- FreeMind - http://freemind.sourceforge.net/ - nice interface, nice applet for displaying maps online. something still a bit wrong.. twin peaksy.. hm...
- Keynote: - http://www.tranglos.com/free/keynote.html - Freeware windows outliner.
Interesting sounding things that I haven't really checked out yet because I haven't had time or because they're commercial
- Woody: - http://sf.net/projects/woody/ (old but not horrible)
- Grandview, More, Thinktank, Ecco
- LEO (python outliner) - http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/front.html
- Treeline (another python outliner) - http://www.bellz.org/treeline/
just bad
- Inspiration - idiot software for mac, does structured views and graph views quite nicely but exports as (urgh) RTF. No semantic markup I can see. Commercial and just lame.
[edit] Further information on outlines, outline processing and outliners
(this lot from vimoutliner readme file)
- Outlining discussion, not product specific
- Discussion on how to use Vim for outlining
- Webpage for the VimOutliner distro
- http://www.outliners.com - Discussion of (proprietary) outliners from days gone by. Downloads for ancient versions of such outliners. Unfortunately, all are dos, windows and mac
- Discussion of (proprietary,Mac) Inspiration software . This page discusses many methods of thought/computer interaction: Visual Outlining, Textual Outlining, Idea mapping, Mind Mapping, Brainstorming with Rapid Fire Entry, Concept Mapping, Storyboarding, Diagrams (using rich symbol library).
- http://members.ozemail.com.au/~caveman/Creative/index.html - Not about outlines, but instead about how to user your brain. The whole purpose of outlines is to use your brain. New ways of using your brain produce new ways to use outlines.
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