lightweight 2-pane outliner for breaking up text quickly

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jan 22, 2013 at 05:30 PM

I would use Brainstorm; it’s lightweight, very swift and is the best tool I know for rearranging text.

The shortcuts to remember:
- Ctrl-Enter within an entry to split it
- Del at the end of an entry to join it with the next
- Alt-Up/Down arrow to move entries up/down
- Home to make an entry the title to enter subsidiary text
- End
- Ctrl-F4 and Alt-V to split your windows and arrange them vertically.
- Ctrl-M to Mark a point to use as a repository; Ctrl-T to ‘throw’ any text there (Ctrl-Shit-T to throw copies)
- Ctrl-N to turn off namesaking, so that you can edit an entry while maintaining any copies intact.

That’s just about all you need. You can also use numbered ‘buckets’ in addition to the main Mark if you want.

Downsides (depending on the point of view):
- It’s not free
- It is not two-pane, though you can have a window with the non-editable “balloon view” which will update in real time as you make changes to the content
- It makes no distinction between title and detail; they are all just ‘entries’
- There’s a 65,535 character limitation for entries. Then again, an entry would correspond to a paragraph, so you wouldn’t want to have such great paragraphs in the first place.