Plain Text (as in .TXT) Outliner?

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Mar 19, 2013 at 06:05 PM

I can think of at least two quite capable tools, both in Windows:

Insight
http://www.dataomega.com/insight/index.htm
It’s been around for years; I believe I first heard about it in the original outliners.com forum. It’s basically a two-pane outliner relying on text files for content and Notetab-compatible catalog files for the outline (I think). I don’t know about actual development, but it says that it is compatible at least with Windows 7. I’ve never actually used it myself. I think that the reason is that it is not Unicode-capable.

EmEditor
http://www.emeditor.com/modules/tutorials4/index.php?id=23
It’s a modern and continuously updated, Unicode text editor with some very nifty functions, for both programming and text-oriented work, handling even .CSV files. Its outliner plug-in (included in the basic installation), shown in the above link, is very capable and flexible. Among others, you can use it both as one- and two-pane, concurrently if you want, and you can customise the character or regular expression which will be used to mark the outline levels. I use it often and find it lightning fast.

In respect to the discussion on EMACS org mode, I must say that if I had learned it at a more tender age, I’d probably still be using it. I personally don’t need the fancy GUIs and enjoy the DOS-like writing environment of Brainstorm, WriteMonkey and the like. But nowadays I doubt that I would find the time or patience to tame the beast.