WorkFlowy Single Pane Outliner

Posted by Fredy
Sep 2, 2012 at 09:22 PM

Columns apart, inliners are nothing other than MS Word, with much less functionality, and not any more functionality (since Word has got that outline view). Most people love this concept, and prefer the best offering, Word.

Outliners, on the other hand, are quite another concept, they do “artificial” fractionizing of your material instead of pressing it into an endless paper roll. Only some people prefer this concept, but they prefer it for good and would never go back. The first concept is the modern realization of ancient rolls, the second is what we’ve used for several centuries now, paper sheets (which were an intermediate technical realization of those ancient tablets).

I’ve always loved paper sheets, in the form of “one paragraph and its sequels, one sheet” - I have been the “index card” type, decidedly, with the only hitch that I never succeeded in miniaturizing my handwriting enough, hence the full format sheets. But even in those years gone by, I observed that most people weren’t index card types, but of the type who prefers, at the end of a paragraph / thought, to continue writing on his sheet of paper even though that means the following paragraph will be broken up between sheet 1 and sheet 2, and so on, for many a page.

So, instead of being astonished that most people do NOT prefer the way I cut up and re-arrange my things, I muse that indeed, as you ask here, Daly, they MUST get something “more” out of their continuous writing experience - seems it’s “flow”, an inconscient sense of “holding things together”...

But permit me to appear brutal when in fact no offence is intended: Most people don’t argue (= conceive thoughts in their writings in general) in very detailed a way, so some “putting things together” does NOT HARM their writings too much - whilst in my personal experience, I need - and people rightly ask me for - some “interjections” since without, too many details are interwoven and striving to multiple directions though.

Which has led me - just not in programming which makes the exception of the rule and where I said, do hundreds of items within multiple indent levels - to my preference for RATHER FLAT hierarchies, but consecutive points, of which my AHK vs. AI post is a graphic illustration.

Of course, for 10 such consecutive points, you’ll do it inline, and you can easily use what-is-that-editor-coming-with-Windows-called-again or anything, but for 100 such points, many of them sub-divided by perhaps 2, 3, 6 sub-points, but only where needed, not in that prevailing artificial systematic way we see in most textbooks, a more “technical” writing environment (e.g. paper sheets where do you do NOT write “beneath the bottom edge in a flow”) - or an outliner, but not an inliner -, might be preferable.

Don’t take me wrong, I’m not saying that text processors (Word, etc., and all its victims it killed in its way) are for the simple-minded. But it’s evident that with rather flat arguing / text construction, the “flow” from one sheet to the next, be it on paper, be it in the electronic age, is REASSURING, whilst it represents a serious obstacle for really differentially thinking / writing - and if you need such tools then, you are willing to do without the “continuous flow from sheet to sheet” experience and the reassurance coming with it.

That’s the answer I give to myself when musing why about 99 p.c. of people “writing” do without proper outlining.