In Praise Of Bike

Bike Outliner
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I’m not sure where I heard about Bike, but I’ve had an annual subscription for a while. I don’t know how long without looking it up, but I think it’s renewed at least two or three times.

Weirdly, though, I’ve never really found a way to use it. It definitely appealed to me, but it just didn’t fit into my workflow. I love outliners, as a type of software, but I had other tools for everything I do.

I can’t be entirely sure, but I think the first Mac I bought (a 2003 Powerbook, purchased when living in Taiwan, almost entirely because it came with an English-language operating system unlike all the PC laptops on sale) had OmniOutliner preinstalled. I didn’t use it, but it introduced me to the concept.

Many years later, as a teacher, I discovered Workflowy and, soon thereafter, the wonderful but currently moribund Dynalist. When Obsidan stabbed Dynalist in the heart I had a brief love-hate affair with OmniOutliner 3 and I’ve dabbled, on and off, with all the other web variants — Logseq, Tana, etc.

I’m currently all-in on Notion, work-wise, for better or worse, but have decided to use Bike as my daily journaling system. I’ve used all the apps for that, too — Day One and everything else you can think of — but Bike seems like a good fit for the way my brain works.

I’m presently in the process of moving over fifteen years of daily entries. It will take me the rest of the year, at least, but the process has made me appreciate everything Bike has to offer.

This is a “Mac-assed Mac app”, if ever I saw one! It gets almost everything right!

So why am I writing this on a support forum? Partly as a thank-you letter, I suppose, but also as a plea that the things I love about the current version of Bike aren’t lost when a Version 2 is released:

  • Tabs AND windows! Same outline, different outlines, change one to another, merge them back. Everything works exactly as it should work! I can’t think of a single other 3rd-party app that I use that does this right.
  • System features! Checking, substitutions, transformations, writing tools — they’re all there.
  • Files! In the Finder! Nothing proprietary, nothing weird. I’d quite like a Pages/Numbers/Keynote-style file-picker when the app opens, but at least it’s not a closed system.
  • Text input is sublime — better than anything else on Mac. Everything is so smooth…

I have feature requests, of course:

  • Date support, and maybe a calendar, to make daily notes easier to find.
  • Keyboard shortcuts for Row formats — heading, block quote, etc.
  • Obsidian-style attachments support — a folder of resources (images, PDFs, etc) that can be referenced in-line but which don’t bloat the actual Bike file.

I sincerely hope Bike sticks around for a long time…

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Thanks, from your list I “think” nothing is lost on Bike 2. Fingers crossed.

It’s unpolished and requires fiddling to setup, but Bike 2 does have a calendar extension. The basic function is show a calendar UI in inspector. Click on date to navigate to (create if needed) that date in your outline.

I don’t think I will add these because. It requires choosing a bunch of keyboard shortcuts that I might want to use for other things later. Also, I feel like the smart row types feature is a better way to add types to rows. With that said, I have defined menu items for each row type, and that means you can set your own desired keyboard shortcuts through system settings.

I want this too, but unlikely for Bike 2.