Thanks for suggesting this. Yes, too much in front of me right now to even think about it, but maybe someday. You can check out some less code that I use, here.
It’s a fair question. I have been thinking about it and that was why I offered this thread idea. I think that you are right, organizer tools are different. Omni, and many others over the years cover that area pretty well. TaskPaper on the other hand, offeres it’s users a very nice and well thought out solution to use plain text as an environment to organize text in. After all, isn’t that what a to-do list is, a task outline? I think so.
What I have come to realize is that with my very first Mac app, FairWitness, back in the day, I used it to write down my ideas fo a workshop or a presentation or … It was also great for having a built in module that it allowed me to set up a time matrix for whatever I was doing. That is I could brainstorm ideas, move them freely in and out of an outline - or use a free form view. Then I could switch the the time matrix view and decide, OK, this is a full day workshop or, this is a half day workshop or, this is a one hour talk. Then I could place my ideas into some sort of useful order.
Even this example is not exactly a standard outlining idea. When I think about Mac software I just can’t help thinking out of the box. With TaskPaper, I can use it to make to-do lists, use calendar dates and all of that. But I can also use it to organize my written thoughts. That is what I use TaskPaper for the most, organizing my text which to me really means, organizing my thoughts and my notes.
Since TaskPaper does not really use styles - but, since TaskPaper also follows what you can do using CSS with LESS files, I can set up customizable line spacing, font weights, font types, font colors and the like. All with tags of course. And tags also help me to search quickly for similar ideas and to cull through large documents and hone in on what I am really trying to say.
I like how it indents and outdents easily. In that way, TaskPaper really is an outlining tool. I like how it is easy to option right arrow to focus on an idea, or option left arrow to get out of a focused idea. This too is a typical outliner function.
In the end, I don’t have a good, solid answer. But I do think that TaskPaper does more than it is advertised to do. As a writer, and as one with some pretty serious organizing deficits, TaskPaper is a great app for text organization - no matter what you want to call it.
If it is just about notes, then as I see it, that puts it into a smaller category of organized text. It’s a good category to be sure, just as to-do lists are a good category. But to me, overall, taskpaper is just very good at text organization with its tag styling, tag searches, and saved searches, it is just very good at helping me to organize text.