Outliner that allows you to work per hierarchy level

Posted by 22111
Feb 27, 2023 at 05:24 PM

As Lucene already said, hoisting’s not really an equivalent, technically speaking: all the more so since it HIDES the siblings, so it does the contrary of what you want in the end, from THAT point of view, but see below…

As Dr.Andus said, Outline4whatever is very old, and comes from a company which doesn’t seem to want their other (Windows) software either, so that wouldn’t be a good choice I think… and then, it’s been very weird from start on…

Another Windows software that seems (!) to do what you want, in this respect (!), is InfoSelect (prohibitively priced, at 280 bucks plus VAT, and here again, no development I’m aware of, some quite some years… to put it mildly); recently, I had trialed IS somewhat, and I hadn’t been impressed at all…

At the end of the day, what you really might want, is some distinction between your current project / case / interest / whatever, whilst “discarding” the “noise from above”, and some Mac program(s?) indeed come with 2 tree/list panes, instead of just-one, and it’s obvious that 3-pane outlining would the way to go, IF you had a real choice, so that beyond the 3-over-2 requirement, available offerings also could fulfill your other needs, which currently is not really the case, and Devonthink, in particular, did AWAY with their intermediate pane some time ago, pretending it “unsettled” (or whatever) their not-so-powery user base…

So, perhaps, the hoisting proposition above wasn’t so much way-off, but might have met your real needs quite well… and then your software choice broadens quite remarkably, incl. Ultra Recall (where you have the advantage of a very “live” forum, combined with a responsive developer and rock-solid software, but that’s just me; e.g. MyInfo 8 now might indeed be much better - robust, finally? - than when I tried it, in versions 5 and 6…) and many others.

Btw, another - just technically speaking that is! - 3-pane outliner is “TaskElf”, a mere 20 bucks plus VAT, but TaskElf is allegedly the worst outliner, of ANY pane-count, there is: It comes with dozens of “columns” / “fields” (since it’s the crippled-but-really-to-the-core offspring of “TaskMerlin”, which is much better, and for which there even exists some groupware version), but you can NOT search/filter “by field” (in the intermediate pane), or then, “by project” (in the tree), just globally, and, of course, there is no “Boolean” search, no “and”, “or”, or “not” then, and “phrase search” is absent, too, as well as any search whatsoever within your current content-pane… and to say it all, within less than 10 minutes, and with just 3 or 4 items, I “succeeded” in getting an extended problem report (“Unhandled exception”, oh yeah…), inviting me to close the program… I followed that advice then, but not without making, a storing, both a screenshot and the full text of the latter one, so as to never risk to get into into problems, with developers who are happy with their, in case ridiculous, programs, but not at all with real (!) reviews they get upon’em, and btw: just see “4 stars out of 5” for that joke of a program here: http://taskelf.findmysoft.com/ - such “reviews” are not only a joke, but an outrage, but since today’s “journalism” is on par, quality-wise, nobody notices…, except me again: “TaskElf has been reviewed by George Norman on 10 Feb 2015. Based on the user interface, features and complexity, Findmysoft has rated TaskElf 4 out of 5 stars, naming it Excellent”; no further questions, Norman, your pardon, Georgie!