[Vimoutliner] General question about outlining

[J Irving]

Hello

* Tim Roberts <timr at probo.com> [2007-04-25 09:51 -0700]:
> Yang wrote:
> >
> > Hmm...is there something about the style I pasted that makes it
> > non-keyboard-friendly? It seems my suggestion is actually simpler to
> > operate than the VO syntax because it doesn't add the responsibility
> > of maintaining two kinds of outline items; i.e. the user need not
> > distinguish header and body items.

I think that's a feature, not a bug.  Many outliners make such a
distinction.

> The only "incompatibility" I see between VO and your requirements is
> with the text wrapping.  Normally, in vim, when you wrap a line of text
> using something like wrapmargin, it begins a new line.  In VO, every new
> line is a new outline item.  If you think about what you're asking, how
> would VO be able to tell the difference between a continuation and a new
> item?  Remember that outlines are stored as plain text.
> 
> This concept is worth some serious thought, because this is actually
> something I've wanted as well.  In random note taking, many of my
> outline items are longer than 75 columns.  I would like to have them
> wrapped in a reasonably pretty fashion, but I've never been able to come
> up with an algorithm for handling that.

Wouldn't the use of a bullet character of some kind take care of
this?  So for example, if you had a line which looked like this:

    - This is a header line which is so very very long that it
      inevitably wraps.
        : then you can have your wrapping notes, if you want, or
        : maybe not.
    - Instead you could just go straight on to the next wrapping
      bulleted header line.

Here it's clear where the header line starts, and that it
continues to the next line.  (Incidentally, I already have vim
configured to do the hanging indent post-bullet automatically when
I use it for email.)

It also has the side effect of making it clearer when a wrapping
note is a peer of a header, rather than a child.  That's something
that confused me when I was starting out with VO.

So this:

    - This is a header
    : this is a peer note

clearly looks wrong, and this:

    - This is a header
        : this is a child note

clearly looks right.  It took me a while to realize that this:

    This is a header
    : this is a peer note

was incorrect.  Of course, this is hardly a compelling argument.

Note, I'm not entirely supportive of what I'm suggesting here.  I
can see the point of it, but I do think it's a presentational
issue.  Yang said in his other mail that he's not interested in
presentational issues, but it seems to me that's all you get from
organizing things this way.  There's nothing here that couldn't be
generated by a very simple post processor.

   cheers, J

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