A look back at the old outliners

Posted by Foolness
Sep 16, 2012 at 03:33 AM

Just found out about this link: http://www.psychinnovations.com/directory/outliners-mind-maps

Many are mentioned here before for obvious reasons but what surprised me was how many names there were that I hadn’t known/hadn’t remembered.

Sadly the actual list is better use for future proof of concepts than anything as many are basic outliners. A few are old links. A few are paid software.

The names that caught my attention are Notetab (mentioned here before) but since it didn’t interest me then, I had no idea it was a HTML editor.

There’s http://nelements.org/ which caught me by attention because of the recent Mindmap collaboration request thread. (No offense to the examples listed but I have no idea how you could do finance on Mindomo or Mind42. When I think potential online mindmaps my thoughts go to services like SpiderScribe that combined the elements of mindmaps with a dashboard interface of Netvibes and Wunderkit.) Then again, I don’t use collaboration tools and I wasn’t a fan of SpiderScribe either. Just throwing out why this caught my intention because as a software the colored bubbles do look dated and underpowered compared to the competition but as far as web mindmaps go, the closest comparison I could think of is Bubbl.us and that one has a singular color lay-out. Another interesting look it has is how similar it looks to Pearltrees albeit less complicated.

Finally, there’s a bunch of outliners named there that surprised me in that they had metadata/bibliographical forms based on their screenshots. FreshOutline and Treeline are the two that caught my attention. (Both are mentioned in this old thread: http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/4179)

Another aspect that surprised me (but only if you’ve been looking for Linux outliners) are the names underneath there:

POSIX (Linux, BSD, *nix)
hnb - Hierarchical notebook (ncurses-interface)
TuxCards Open source outliner for Linux
Riot - ncurses-outliner, using mbox as file-format
KJots [1] - Free and simple to use outliner for KDE on Linux. Tree structured, it refers to nodes as ‘books’ and notes as ‘pages’. Book view shows a TOC and view mode for all entries. No word wrap.
KnowIt Open source outliner, KDE-based
Gjots2 - Python/GTK/GNOME nice outline editor. Data compatible with KJots.
Zim - A desktop wiki and outliner

The names are definitely in the forum but there’s no one topic listing them all and if you do a quick google search for linux outliners, Zim by far is the most popular with Tuxcard probably coming behind because of the association with the Linux mascot.

Doing a quick search, Riot and Knowit are the ones who appear to not yet be mentioned.