Mac outliners, one-pane, modeless and general-purpose like text editors?

Posted by Derek Peschel
Jun 24, 2009 at 03:24 AM

Very interesting Web forum! It’s nice to know other people are asking these kinds of demanding questions.

I’ve always loved the idea of outlining software but never found an outliner that fits me. Right now I’m using Mac OS X and a text editor called jstar.

http://joe-editor.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/joe-editor/

I have a plain text format for outlines which is so dumb and unspecified that it looks quite versatile on the screen. (But I’ve never tried to actually parse any of my outlines!) Typing large amounts of text is trivially easy. The normal outliner editing operations, though, are difficult or impossible.

Can anyone suggest a program that knows about outlines but preserves the formless “blank sheet of paper” look of plain text? By that I mean:
? one pane
??multiple windows, tiled or overlapping, so I can work with multiple files or multiple parts of the same file
??word wrap as you type and erase
??for preformatted or wide text, you should be able to turn off word wrap
??outline items should accommodate tabs and returns
??I suppose outline items can be restricted to one or more entire lines of text
??multiple paragraphs in an outline item might be nice
??no “arrange” vs. “edit” modes as many one-pane outliners (like Opal) have
??no “view” vs. “edit” modes as Wikis have
??true tree structured documents; I’m not sure what extra features (columns, links, something beyond trees) I need
??commands like hide/show, gather, sort, etc. that make use of the tree structure

These features would be nice too:
??keyboard-driven so I can enter lots of data and do some editing
??also mouse-driven for more intensive editing
??separate the outline structure from the rendering, so say you can put children to the right of parents instead of below
??allow the user to incrementally extend or change the program where possible, by changing the source code or by writing small extensions
??allow the user to create more outline-editing operations

Open source would be nice but it limits the possibilities. Thanks for your help!

—Derek