two-pane outliner that can show more than one note at a time in the viewer/editor pane?

Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 11, 2013 at 10:06 AM

jimspoon wrote:
>My question is - do you know of a two-pane outliner that will show the
>content of more than one item in the editor pane at the same time?
> >But in the
>usual two-paner, I can only see one such small block of text, and I have
>to move the highlight in the tree constantly to read through my items.

This is exactly why I no longer use two-pane outliners for writing (or anything, really, other than The Guide as temporary storage of removed text fragments during editing).

The solutions that I know of to enable you to see multiple and far-away notes in the hierarchy side-by-side with your edit window are:

- Gingko app (https://gingkoapp.com): you can do the writing in the 3rd column (which can be exported individually), while you can scroll to any note within the hierarchy in column 1 and 2. (My current favourite.)

- Outline 4D: while it’s a single-pane outliner (in outline mode), it has multiple document interface, so you can arrange any number of panes within the main window, displaying either notes only, outline titles and notes, or titles only, in any variation. This offers great flexibility for writing. I used that set-up for about a year, and it works very well. Although I have switched to Gingko for actual writing up, I still copy over the headings into O4D just to better visualise the developing outline hierarchy.

- ConnectedText v. 6: the new floating windows feature. Although you can only do editing in one window at a time, you can open as many floating windows (by simply holding down ALT and clicking on a topic) as you like, and freely position them on your desktop. As I use CT as my notes database, I’m consulting it in my right monitor as I’m writing in the middle monitor in Gingko.

The only dual-pane outliner with MDI that comes to my mind is Sense Editor PRO, but I haven’t spent any significant time with that to have an opinion about it. Check out the screenshots:

http://www.silvaelm.co.uk/products-sense-professional-edition.shtml