[Vimoutliner] General question about outlining

[Steve Litt]

On Wednesday 25 April 2007 12:51, Tim Roberts wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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.

Hi Tim,

Your mileage may vary, but what I found over the years is that slowly my 
outlining adapted to VO and that my headlines became shorter. Often a long 
headline adapts itself to decomposition into a main headline and several 
children, and the longer you use VO, the more natural that becomes. Now that 
VO has body text another alternative is a short headline whose first child is 
a paragraph of body text.

I still frequently have long headlines, especially when taking notes based on 
a verbal presentation. In that case I leave them long (Vim cleanly handles 
lines hundreds of characters long), and modify them later.

I used to hate that VO headlines wouldn't wrap, but after a few months of 
using it, that stopped being an issue.

Of course, like I said, your mileage may vary :-)

SteveT

Steve Litt
Author: Universal Troubleshooting Process books and courseware
http://www.troubleshooters.com/