OmniOutliner, a second look at story grids

Posted by Amontillado
Oct 5, 2025 at 03:48 PM

You are right about price. I was thinking about features when I called OO a poor man’s Scrivener. You can write in subdocuments and re-order them. Mellel will do the same thing with full-featured word processing. Scrivener will do much more.

On the other hand, OO is a jack of all trades and probably a master of outlining. TaskPaper will archive completed tasks and Javascript will perform auto-repeat. I think Omni Automation could do the same thing. I haven’t had time to look into it.

There are lots of little touches that help OO, too.

For instance, I’ve seen outliners that use the return key to create a new topic. OO does too, but only if you’re editing a topic. If you’re editing a note, the return key is a line break. That falls in line with what I expect.