looking for a bare bones outliner with NO fancy formatting

Posted by benjaloo
Jan 30, 2021 at 08:28 PM

I’m a big fan of plain text files (along the lines of todo.txt and the whole plain text productivity movement) but I do love outlines.

Notepad++ (which is not a word processor, but a pretty excellent plain text editor) can be used a simple outliner. Not fancy in any way. It has features specific to a whole bunch of programming languages. If you just select YAML as the language, it’s a decent plain text outliner that can collapse and expand at any level.
One nice feature of it is that the plain text files it saves still maintain the outline structure with indents, as opposed to some fancier outliners when they export outlines as plain text. Exporting as plain text makes it easy to paste into an email or any document, and avoids the issue of compatibility of the file with colleagues who may not have the same software.