Outliners vs. Inliners (and a little intro to programming with Outliners (but not Inliners, sorry, Steve!))

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Sep 3, 2012 at 10:55 PM

Fredy,

This is largely a matter of semantics. You claim your “true outliner” is the tree pane in a two-pane outliner. Fine. That means the whole piece of software, content and all, is NOT an outliner… at least by your very definition… just the tree-pane is. In most cases, the tree-pane in a two-pane outliner is not nearly as flexible and easily editable as a good single-pane outliner (admittedly, there are not many of those).

As you point out, the origin of the outline is a focus on the structure and logic of the topics. That’s what a one-pane outliner forces you to do.

I believe, however, that a one-pane outliner with inline text makes for a better writing environment, because it treats your project as a single document, not as a collection of documents. The problem with my approach is there is no application that does a good job of it. If you were to read my article about GrandView, you’d see what I’m talking about. GrandView allowed you to keep the content separate, as you prefer, but also allowed you to see it inline, giving you the best of both worlds.

I don’t really understand how a two-pane outliner helps you to be more oriented in your “neighborspace” than you would be in a one-pane outline.

I’m actually not in charge of what people call their software, so if you want to call two-pane outliners true outliners, I honestly have no objection.

Steve Z.