Just what is an outliner?

Posted by yosemite
May 6, 2017 at 04:22 AM

I think of an outline as being a list with sequence and hierarchy, where the user controls both. To me a mind map is usually not an outline because sequence doesn’t matter. I think of them as a tree. In an outline sub-items have a user-controlled or manually assigned sequence, in a tree they generally don’t. Another example of tree is the folder tree in a file manager. Often the sub-items are automatically sorted alphabetically and can’t be manually ordered.

Following from that overly-long definition of terms… to me an outliner is an editor for (text) outlines. So, good control over sequence, hierarchy, and, importantly, text. There’s got to be more than a dash of text editing, otherwise it just doesn’t seem like an outliner to me. More of an organizer of items, as others have mentioned.

Outliners with additional features, views, structures, can still be outliners. wiki-style links between items comes to mind. Columns. Inline images. And so on.

Side note: the dictionaries I looked at don’t have “our” definition of outline. They say nothing about hierarchy and few even mention list. They say “plan” and “summary”.