Just a question. Is this essentially Acta revisited? Are you old enough to remember?
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I think I might be old enough, but I was on windows mostly until OS X.
The outliner from the past that I’ve heard most about is MORE, which again I never used. But yes, pure simple outliner is the goal. Though I also do want to add a bunch of features. That will be balancing act, trying to give more utility while also no losing what I like about the 1.0.
Acta preceeded MORE and was pretty clean. As I’m sure you know, Circus Ponies Notebook, which I loved, was at the other extreme. Not sure why it died. Your FoldingText serves me well, but something even simpler is fine. I wouldn’t mind being able to collapse a multi-line row, but not a deal breaker. Good job so far.
Interesting, I didn’t know that.
I used Acta, but don’t remember much about it. I was a heavy MORE user, but my favorite from that period was GrandView, which ran under MS-DOS (not even Windows!). It had an ability to assign Categories to branches/items and then toggle to/from a special view of a Category sorted by its values. The biggest use I had for this as follows: I had a master outline containing all the projects I was working on. Under each project in that outline were all my informational notes relevant to the project, as well items I tagged as Action Items. At any point in time I could toggle to a special view where I could see and edit all the action items from all my projects in one big list automatically sorted by priorities. In that view I could adjust priorities as desired, edit the action items, and expand/edit their children. Then a single keypress would toggle me back to master outline view where I could focus on the details (information and action items) of individual projects.
Thus there was never a need to spend extra resources maintaining a “To Do” list and keeping it in sync with my working notes–since my “To Do” list was just a sorted, filtered (but still editable) view of the action items in the master outline.
In its early days OmniOutliner started to explore this approach, but then split off all “To Do” management into a separate app–OmniFocus–which I find to be mostly a bloated time-waster.
The only thing I’ve found that came close to natively implementing GrandView’s model was Circus Ponies Notebook, which I agree was overly-complex and somewhat buggy (until its final release which was really clean). ChrisW: It basically died because not enough people were using it and its developer finally gave up.
TaskPaper (and eventually Bike?) allows one to assign and filter by tags. But turning that into a live, sorted view that one can toggle back and forth from would require scripting beyond my abilities.
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