best outliner you use? (2018)

Posted by Jan S.
Apr 11, 2018 at 07:56 AM

I’m sorry but I have to say it: Emacs org-mode is the best outliner.

At least on Windows there is really no competition—which has been really frustrating for me—and it doesn’t look like there is anything on the way. On the Mac there is some decent software available. But when it comes to features org-mode has it all: text editing, structure editing, column view, latex support, all kinds of linking and tagging, e-mail integration, calendar integration, contacts integration, web-browsing, bookmarking, password management, exporting (via the standard org-export or with pandoc [basically into every possible text format including table-of-contents, formatted citations, cross-references with template support and automation]), making websites, publishing to blogs etc.

Of course there is the “learning curve” argument. But (1) it’s justified by the feature list, (2) it’s really not that hard to learn. If you can learn Python-scripting for ConnectedText or LUA-scripting for NoteCase, then I would assume you can also learn a little elisp to customize Emacs/org-mode. (Most of it can be copied from public configuration files on GitHub anyway).