Zavala - An open source outliner for Macs, iPads, and iPhones

Posted by satis
Jan 7, 2026 at 06:35 PM

Thanks Maurice. The two Mac outliners I started using in the 80s, which always added a new row at the same level (like when writing paragraphs), were Acta from David Dunham (which amazingly is still available, as freeware), and MORE from David Winer (which lives on in spirit as WordLand [in beta], a browser-based outline-based text editor for Wordpress that can output OPML)

https://www.a-sharp.com/acta/

https://this.how/wordland/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n6N9wOaGI4

In Winer’s intro to outlines he definitively says to hit Return to create a sibling item.

https://outlinerhowto.opml.org/

(To be fair, practically everything Winer ever writes or says is expressed definitively - one reason he’s often ignored.)

At any rate I far more often am making ‘sibling’ list rows (which I might then fill in with sub-entries later) than a main item followed immediately by a ‘child’ sub-entry (whose design means hitting Return a 2nd time creates a grandchild sub-sub-item, which seems like a relatively uncommon occurrence). My muscle memory is for writing at sibling/paragraph level, and using key commands for child and ‘aunt’ sub- and parent-rows.

A year ago I asked Jesse about this wrt Bike and he thought using a Return to continue at the same row level was “confusing” and suggested “creating an AppleScript or Shortcuts Action and associating it with a keyboard shortcut.” Instead I moved on.

>I believe that this is a Settings option in OmniOutliner.

OmniOutliner’s **General Settings > Keyboard** has a setting ‘New rows are created…” from which you can choose between ‘Always at the same level’ and ‘Indented if there are children’. But I don’t believe there ever was a setting or occasion when hitting Return created a new child row from either a *single entry* or from a *new sub-item*.