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Bike Outliner: Adds Row Types
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Posted by nirans@gmail.com
Aug 10, 2023 at 12:25 AM
What is it specifically about Bike that makes it useful for lists?
Amontillado wrote:
For a number of reasons it’s nice to make maps of content in Devonthink.
>Bike is probably my new favorite tool for that because it’s quick and
>low friction for editing lists. Devonthink links work fine in Bike
>files, so it can link to DT notes, files, groups, or tags.
>
>Yesterday I found the game changer. Devonthink recognizes links,
>backlinks, and mentions in Bike files.
>
>There is one small wrinkle, not Bike’s fault, and with an easy
>workaround.
>
>Devonthink will open and edit a Bike file. Unfortunately, it changes the
>file type from Bike to HTML and you no longer have a Bike-friendly file
>- but there’s a nice workaround.
>
>Set a smart rule to lock any file with a Bike extension on creation,
>import, or moving into the database.
>
>The lock is just within the context of Devonthink. You can still open a
>“locked” file in Bike and edit to your heart’s content. The only
>limitation is I haven’t found a way to save an empty Bike file as a
>template in Devonthink. Creating a new Bike file from a template results
>in an HTML file, not a Bike file.
>
>I grumble, but I can live with that limitation.
Posted by Amontillado
Aug 10, 2023 at 02:20 AM
Hi, Nirans,
The auto-indent is nice, and in outline edit mode it’s easy to move blocks of lines around.
While some markdown editors will surely do such things, Bike does that very well.
Bike has only recently gotten row types to add checkboxes or set a line as a note. Those features are very nice, but I like a different way of adding a note to an outline entry.
I use one level of indent for hierarchy. If I want to have a note attached to an entry, I use double-indent. The notes are visually different from the hierarchy.
I wish Bike had tagging. OutlineEdit does that nicely, but Devonthink doesn’t see links inside an OutlineEdit file like it does with Bike.
nirans@gmail.com wrote:
What is it specifically about Bike that makes it useful for lists?
>
>Amontillado wrote:
>For a number of reasons it’s nice to make maps of content in Devonthink.
Posted by nirans@gmail.com
Aug 10, 2023 at 04:56 AM
Thanks.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Aug 10, 2023 at 08:22 AM
I agree, tagging would be the icing on the cake. Of course you can insert tags and then search for them – Bike’s search function is excellent – but it’s not the same thing as filtering by tags.
Amontillado wrote:
>I wish Bike had tagging. OutlineEdit does that nicely, but Devonthink
>doesn’t see links inside an OutlineEdit file like it does with Bike.
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.