[Vimoutliner] General question about outlining

[Steve Litt]

On Tuesday 24 April 2007 20:40, Yang wrote:
> Hi, is it possible to use VimOutliner simply for working with the
> following style of outline?
>
>  - plugin will auto-insert bullets when i
>    manually break a line
>  - plugin will auto-hanging-indent when
>    the text wraps (and preferably
>    maintain filled lines as I edit)
>      - hitting tab (or something) will
>        indent the outline
>      - hitting shift-tab will de-indent
>        the outline (instead of needing
>        to manually delete the correct
>        amount)
>
> Basically, this is close to what you'd find in any WYSIWYG outline
> editor, but for some reason I have never been able to find anything
> like this in the text editor world (vim/emacs). If you know of any
> such resource, I would greatly appreciate the tip. Thanks in advance!

Grandview, my first outline processor, worked like that (as I remember). I 
think the editor derived outliners don't work like that because they're built 
around editors, and editors don't work like that as part of their normal 
operation.

Another feature that editor derived outliners have trouble with are cloned 
nodes. Text editors have no features to store stuff that can be changed from 
multiple places.

The original reason to use Vim as an outliner engine was the simplest 
possible -- it was the fastest way I could get a Linux-hosted editor :-) 
Expediency. 

The original VO wasn't VO at all -- it was one or two Vim scripts that set up 
Vim for smart indentation. Once outlining with Vim, it quickly became obvious 
that Vim's touch-typist-friendly keystrokes made VO a heck of a lot faster 
for outline authoring than Grandview or MS Word. Then we (by that time it was 
we -- there were at least three of us) realized that its Vim foundation meant 
it was trivial for a Vim user to learn.

In certain respects (cloning is the most obvious), VO is bumping up against 
the limitations of Vim. But rewriting it without Vim, to use the same 
keystrokes as it currently does, would be an immense undertaking. We don't 
have the manpower.

Hope this explains how VO got to be the way it is.

Thanks

SteveT