[Vimoutliner] graphs/trees

[Scott Scriven]

* Peter Princz <princzp at gmail.com> wrote:
> See them here:
> http://princzp.googlepages.com/vimoutliner

So, under the "limits" section, you mention wanting to represent
graphs instead of strict trees.

That's something I've given a lot of thought to over the past 5-6
years, and I'm about to start work on a fifth prototype
filesystem designed for this kind of thing.

Basically, I've been looking for a filesystem which represents a
directed graph instead of a tree.  So, it's still hierarchic, but
instead of each node having one parent and multiple children, it
would be multiple parents and multiple children.  It's like
hierarchic labels or tags, built into the filesystem.

If reiserfs4 allowed this, I'd have a good basis for building
apps.  But POSIX forbids multiple hardlinks to directories, and
has no decent way to "ls" parents, so I'm stuck using more custom
storage to represent the graph.

While it's a really neat idea and I'm interested in building it,
I don't see this sort of thing being feasible in VO.  Since it's
primarily a text editor, using plaintext storage, it seems
like graphs would be very difficult and kludgy to implement.

OTOH, VO almost makes me want to write v2 of my old outliner
program.  VO has incredible text-editing capabilities, but it's
fairly weak on the actual tree manipulation.  It would be nice to
have something more like a hierarchic database, where each node
can have its own unique set of attributes.  But I don't know how
much I would actually use something like that, so I doubt I'll
write it.  VO is arguably more useful most of the time, even if
it is just a folding text editor with some macros and export
plugins.


-- Scott