Good outline format!

Bike Outliner
1

I like the native outline format very much.

Not only because it’s a clean and simple subset of the HTML standard – accessible to the full ecosystem of HTML tools and supporting software, but because each document and node has a unique id.

It was always hard to create stable hyperlinks from outside to particular lines in TaskPaper – any document editing would change their position and their path, but I notice that:

  • each Bike document has a full unique UUID (by which we could find it even if the file name changed)
  • and within a document each line has a unique id too, allowing for stable links from elsewhere, even after edits to the content and position of a line.

(Not to mention structured queries/reports based on whole folders of Bike files and written in standard query languages like XQuery, XPath etc)

All of this combined with the sheer speed of Bike (I’ve tried the Moby Dick experiment :slight_smile: – heavens !) feels very encouraging …

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and, of course, the native opening and saving of

  • Plain text outlines (including TaskPaper tab indented),
  • and OPML outlines

make interchange very quick and friction-free.

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Moving away from TaskPaper style plain text was a hard mental hurdle for me, but I’m also excited about using a more standard and structured format. Again, not the focus for 1.0, but I think it sets Bike up will for future scripts and plugins.

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