looking for a bare bones outliner with NO fancy formatting

Posted by Tiggerlou
Jan 14, 2021 at 03:47 PM

In the process of converting my hundreds of Clarisworks documents into Evernote and Dynalist files (thanks for the latter recommendation), I’m realizing that there’s a feature of Clarisworks that I’m missing in both of them, as well as Microsoft Word: bare bones word processing that doesn’t automatically clutter me up with annoyingly unnecessary formatting.
As a matter of fact, I often open up a new Clarisworks document to *completely strip* formatting from a block of text.
So many times, when I’m trying to copy something into Evernote, the text will get all snarled up with HUGE headline fonts. I fix that text only to have it happen again on the next line of text. Exasperating! I do not want to spend all my time editing out formatting that I never wanted in the first place, especially when I’m trying to grab text in a hurry.
Ditto with Dynalist. If I want to type a series of underscore characters there, to indicate a blank space in text that needs to be filled in later—arrgh I suddenly get italics. I do use the italics feature in Dynalist, but I don’t always want it. I also wish I could copy and paste text more efficiently in Dynalist. I can only copy and paste one line at a time.

By the same token, I have no use for task-management-style checkboxes or other fussy features cluttering up the document. Looking for clean, clean, clean. Just the text, ma’am, and nothing but the text.

Any recommendations for software that would do that, without a Swiss Army knife of features popping up and getting in my way? It would be great if it were an outliner, but that’s not absolutely necessary.