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OmniOutliner 6
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Posted by rafael costacurta
Nov 9, 2025 at 10:10 AM
for whomever it may concern, Joan Westenberg recently droped an interview with Ken Case, CEO of OmniGroup.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/interview-ken-case-omnifocus
I’ve been following Westenberg site since Satis posted here a link to a provocative post tittled ‘I Deleted My Second Brain’ :
https://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/46583
Posted by Amontillado
Nov 22, 2025 at 05:02 AM
I’ve been playing with a certain workflow using OmniOutliner.
The idea is to see the outline entries for a single chapter plus background notes that have global reach.
Something like this.
In Chapter 1, Scene 1, Jack and Jill climb a hill. There is a drought, and everyone’s thirsty. Scene two hints Jack’s brother is secretly hitting on Jill.
When I’m looking at Chapter 1 in the outline, I want to see the story points and I also want to see and take notes for background information. In this case, I know Jack’s brother’s wandering eyes are going to be important later.
Sure enough, in Chapter 20 Jack’s flip-flops are sabotaged and he falls, breaking his crown. The Chapter 20 view of the outline shows this plus the same notes I took in Chapter 1 about Jill’s dalliance with Jack’s brother.
OmniOutliner isn’t bad for this sort of thing. Here are some expanded thoughts - https://thirdreef.wordpress.com/2025/11/21/a-breakthrough-of-the-obvious/
Posted by Amontillado
Nov 27, 2025 at 06:22 PM
I know. I’m overposting. I’ll try to do limit myself.
But in the meantime, I’ve finally taken a look at Omni-Automation for OmniOutliner. The automation is based on Javascript.
Very, very, cool. You can enter single statements in a console window and see results in real time.
The outlining/cross reference idea in my last post was my first target for automation.
Here’s what I ended up with after a few hours experimentation.
Notes go under a Research topic.
A column called “xref” (for cross reference) gets space or line delimited tokens. Basically tags identifying topics.
I can click in an outline topic and run my new automation.
It focuses the outline on the topic I chose, which means I see that topic plus its descendants.
Then it adds every topic it finds under Research containing any of the tags found in the focused segment of the outline.
For instance, click on the Chapter 3 topic in the outline and run the automation. You see chapter 3 and its subordinate topics. Underneath that, assuming your Reseach topic was below your story outline, you see every relevant note.
If I set the background color of the Research topic to something different than my proper outline, new rows added under Research use the new background. New rows added in the outline retain their default color. That nicely differentiates Research from Outline.
You can almost do that with filtering, but not quite. Also, you don’t have to maintain any stored filters. Write your outline, keep your notes, tag everything as appropriate, and then just choose a topic and run the automation to get a fresh look based on current tagging.
The only oddity I’ve found is that if a Research topic matches my tag search and if it has child topics, the child topics appear. That’s because focusing on a topic also displays child rows.
I think I’m OK with that. It’s sort of of like child rows inherit tags from parents. If the parent’s tags match, I see its sub-tree. If only a child’s tags match, I just see the child.
That’s probably what I want, anyway.
Very happy. Time will tell if it’s actually useful, but I think it will be.