Bike Outliner: Adds Row Types

Posted by Jesse Grosjean
Aug 10, 2023 at 11:23 AM

> What is it specifically about Bike that makes it useful for lists?

I think all outliners are pretty good at making lists. Press enter, type, press enter.

What I think makes Bike different from pretty much any outliner is the quality of text editing mode, combined with structured outline editing mode. You can see this demonstrated in demo video on website.

Bike’s text editing mode is unconstrained and works just as you would expect a plain text editor to work. There are no weird cases where the text caret doesn’t act right, or ends up in slightly wrong place… it’s a fully functional multiline text editor. Almost no outliners work this way, instead they are cell based, you edit one row at a time. And while there are ways to move from one cell to another, there are always edge cases where it doesn’t quite work right.

With the escape key Bike also has outline editing mode. In this mode Bikes commands work like a traditional outliner. Move a row, child rows come with it.

This combination is pretty unique, and for me makes it particularly nice for editing lists.

> I agree, tagging would be the icing on the cake. Of course you can
> insert tags and then search for them

Tags are definitely on my todo list.

Big features that I plan to tackle (and start to complete, but probalby not all of them for a bit still) this fall are query language, filtering, tags, stylesheets. They all sorta depend on each other, so I’m puzzling through how exactly I’ll do it. I need query language first and have made progress on that. Then will figure.