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

Posted by David Dunham
Jun 30, 2009 at 09:46 PM

Derek Peschel wrote:

>I may have been thinking of another program when I
>mentioned modes, but Opal does make a distinction between selecting an entire topic
>and selecting the entire contents of a topic. Is it always possible to select anything
>with the keyboard?

Right, but that’s not a mode. It’s a selection, like selecting an icon in Finder, or the icon’s label. You can select text or topics. (Opal supports multiple topic selection.) It should always be possible to select with the keyboard.

>One thing I do know: with the right prefs, you can use return and
>the indentation keys to add a series of topics and their contents. But delete doesn’t
>backspace across topics (that I’ve found), so right there Opal doesn’t give
>text-editor-style behavior.

Well, no. It’s an outliner. You can hold down backspace to get a fresh start on the topic. And you wouldn’t want to delete the line ending that a text editor would use, lots of the time you wouldn’t end up with a valid outline.

>Incidentally, the help says to use System
>Preferences to set the keyboard shortcuts. Opal isn’t on the list, however. Is that
>because I am running the trial version from downloaded files, rather than as an
>installed package?

That shouldn’t make a difference. As it happens, a recent review went into some detail on this so I’ll just point to it: http://themacosxguru.blogspot.com/2009/06/opal-old-school-in-nicest-possible-way.html