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I’m looking for an outliner!
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Why I’m looking
- I’ve been creating outlines since high school. I started with pen and paper, then moved to text editors—first Word, then Google Docs, and finally, plaintext files. I’ve been creating plaintext outlines for about 5 years. I typically save my outlines as Markdown and export them using Pandoc if they need to be shared with other folks. I use outlines to take notes, plan projects, create documentation, and as todo lists. I’m a plaintext junky. Whenever and wherever I can, I use plaintext. I edit plaintext with either Neovim, VimR, or nvALT depending on whether I’m in the command line or not. The major hiccup in my plaintext-outline-life is when it comes to editing and creating plaintext outlines on the go. Typically, I use Coda on iOS…which is very much like bringing a siege weapon and a concrete mixer to a Pokémon card tournament. Coda is a spectacular piece of software, but very much not meant for maintaining plaintext outlines, notes and todos. I need a new tool. I want to supercharge my outlining workflow. I’m on the hunt! I’m looking for more than an iOS plaintext editor, I’m looking for a full(ish) featured outliner.
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What I’m looking for
- Cross platform, both macOS and iOS (or web-based)
- Document syncing (Dropbox or SFTP preferable)
- Ability to reorder items in a list
- Preferably scriptable (e.g. I’d like to be able to setup reminders triggered off of certain markup so that I can use outlines as task lists…but this may be asking a lot)
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Contenders
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OmniOutliner
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Platform
- iOS
- macOS
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Pros
- Seems to be the tried and true tool for this kind of thing
- OmniGroup seems to be leaning into the whole scriptability thing lately
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Cons
- A wee bit expensive since I’d need to buy both the desktop and basic iOS clients
- Not 100% certain how interoperable their file formate is
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Platform
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Workflowy
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Platform
- Web
- “Desktop,” e.g. electron app
- iOS
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Pros
- I already have an account
- 250 free notes a month
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Cons
- Weird to say, but it is just really ugly, aesthetically
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Platform
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TaskPaper
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Platform
- macOS
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Pros
- Plaintext 😁
- I love how minimal this app is. It brings almost all of the functionality I’m looking for to what is ostensibly just plaintext!
- Cons
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Platform
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OmniOutliner
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Other Thoughts
- @jthingelstad recommend that I also check out mind mapping applications. I’ve been doing a big of research there, too, but don’t think they fill the role with what I’m looking to do, mostly because they don’t mesh wicked well with my way of thinking. I like to think things together, nested parentheticals
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In writing this post, I’ve come to wonder if the real solution would be to separate concerns a bit?
- Find an app other than Coda for editing and creating plaintext on iOS (Drafts, perhaps?)
- Start to use a more feature-rich todo manager other than SwiftoDo
- At this moment I’m leaning towards OmniOutliner or Taskpaper…but I’m incredibly indecisive when it comes to this sort of thing, so who knows.
- Input always welcome!
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Why I’m looking