Mourning the passing of Pocketthinker

Posted by JBfrom
Oct 24, 2011 at 04:05 PM

“As a single-pane outliner, Grandview was unique in my experience. Each heading (note or item, whatever you wish to call it) could have a full wordprocessing document associated with it. Here is how it worked: Create your heading, press the F5 key (I think that was the key) and you switch to a wordprocessing window in which you could write as much text as you wanted. This was a fully functional wordprocessor (lacking some of today?s whistles and bells, such as tables). Once you were done, hit the F5 key again and return to the outline. Okay that?s not so different than the way some of the two-pane outliners work. But here?s the big difference: Now you can toggle the view so that you can see your outline with just the headers or the entire associated documents in the same pane. I found this very powerful, because good writing involves context. In Grandview you can see the whole project as if it were one long wordprocessing document, or you could view only its outline, or you could focus specifically on one section of the text. This ability to take in the many aspects of your project is the perfect writing environment, in my opinion. I have yet to find that functionality in any other outliner.”

Org-mode does everything listed here. It can even launch programs and files via links within the text.

The indirect-buffer is key to multi-pane outlining.

“When considering single-pane outliners as writers? tools it?s not simply a question of features - although GV can hoist, clone, gather, binsort, attach categories, and so on - but of general usability, and that intangible but important feeling of being in an undistracting ?writer?s environment? rather than in a spreadsheet or PIM. “

Org-mode does this too.

“Think of a two-pane outliner like ActionOutline. You create your structure in the tree pane, and then can write as much as you want in the note/editor window. Now visualize this? in the tree pane you can toggle the view so that you can either see just the item headers or the item headers with the note contents all in the tree view. Not only that, you can select which headers show their content and which do not.”

Does this too.

How are there not any other Org-mode users on this forum? Carsten must suck them all over to his place, never to stray… or even fantasize.