Just what is an outliner?

Posted by jaslar
May 7, 2017 at 02:46 AM

Agreed about “this is a fun topic to think about together.” I’ll take a swing at it, and might learn something.

I think the wikipedia article is pretty right on. It’s the “dedicated” part of this thread that I’m struggling with. Here’s my premise: at minimum, an outliner displays and manipulates relationships in three ways.

1. It shows the hierarchical relationship: parent, child, sibling.
2. It allows for the selective collapse and reveal of children to reveal structure.
3. It allows for the rapid reordering of the structure - promoting, demoting, moving - such that all the children, for instance, can go along.

I’ve seen some pretty barebones outliners that do just that - no hoisting, no cloning, no additional text columns, etc. But if it has those three things, or can give me a view like that, TO ME, it’s an outliner. So I find, Stephen, that I have no trouble calling Editorial (markup headers that can be folded, and draggable blocks that let me reorder the structural relationships) is an outliner. Freeplane has an outline mode or view: good enough for me. Compared to Dynalist, the commands for folding markdown might be clunkier, but that’s interface, not function. Likewise, I think of something like Inspiration. It was one of the first, one pane outliners with the core feature set. But now, it’s also a concept mapper, a graphical outliner. But it seems wrong to say it’s no longer a “dedicated” outliner. It is if you use those features.

For many years, I used Notecase almost exclusively. Again, in my view it’s absolutely an outliner. It just also allows me to add longer text notes. But the value of it is that I can glance at the left column to see the relationships and shuffle things around.

One, two, and three pane outliners remains a useful distinction to me. I can also see the value of tracking software that does this under one software package on both Mac and iOS platforms.

But I guess I would respectfully disagree both with the notion of “dedicated” and outliners that don’t show hierarchy.

I do see a difference between outliners in which every paragraph is a “header” and ones in which some text blocks are not hierarchical (embedded notes that operate more like regular word processing. But - and I do realize this gets tricky - I don’t think that’s a core feature. It’s just an APPROACH to outlining. KAMAS had an 88 character limit on a header; attached text could be paragraphs long, but your couldn’t use outliner function on those, just the headers. MORE treated any paragraph as manipulable. Both both were outliners.

OK, y’all, take me to school! (And Paul, I don’t think anybody was miffed. Come on back and stumble around with the rest of us.)