[Vimoutliner] Proposal: reverse indenting outliner

[ImLikeWhoa]

Steve Litt wrote:
> 
> On Saturday 10 March 2007 15:37, ImLikeWhoa wrote:
> Hi ImLikeWhoa,
> 
> The existing program will quite easily create documents the way you
> envision. 
> I was one of the early adopters of VO, and back in those days it did
> little 
> more than go to the same indentation level you were on, which it would do
> for 
> you. Another feature that would work right out of the box is executable 
> lines. I don't know whether interoutline linking would work with reverse 
> outlining -- check it out. If not, it shouldn't be hard to get it to work.
> 
> There are two things that won't be easy -- checkboxes are one, and then
> the 
> big cahuna of difficulties -- expand/collapse. Expand/colapse is done 
> primarily by Vim, not by VO. To enable expand/collapse, you'd need to
> write 
> quite a bit of Vim language code. It wouldn't be at all trivial.
> 
> You have me curious. What do you use a reverse outline for? Where did you 
> learn to think like that? Certainly not in school, they teach forward 
> outlining exclusively. As a matter of fact, before your email it never 
> occurred to me to reverse an outline.
> 
> What are the advantages you derive out of that method of outlining?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> SteveT
> 
You ask intriguing questions!  I use outliing when organizing a project with
many parts, such as a meeting with many participants, a candidate search or
a report with many sections and stages of preparation.    I developed the
reverse-indent form after trying to keep a lab notebook in ordinary outline
style as a young lab assistant.  the body text was always indented so far
that the page was almost all white space.  Also I was typing this with a
typewriter, which would not automatically indent each line.  So the
reverse-indent style  is a natural one for outlines that have a number of
levels and where the bulk of the outline is body text.  I realize that
nowadays many text editors will insert initial tabs to preserve the indent
level from the previous line.  But I've often used editors on small
computers without this refinement, so I didn't want to rely on it.  

Best, wishes, ImLikeWhoa
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