How to edit outlines on the free OS. And how not to.
Why is it so hard to find a decent outliner for Linux?
Here are some that I’ve tried and discarded:
gjots & gjots2: Used it for a month or so then noticed it couldn’t export my documents, so I had no way of printing the outline.
treeline: painfully ugly.
VIM outliner : I’m an emacs man.
emacs outline-mode: But I do like a pointing device to be part of my outliner experience.
leo: Very cool but painfully ugly. Not in active development. Got a QT-gui in late 2008 and now looks quite nice. The development is most active indeed.
gnome-think: Useless and ugly. Not in active develpment.
kdissert, vym, freemind: all too mindmappy.
knowit: actually looks kind of alright. No releases for the last two years though.
notecase: This looks pretty good. Right now it’s my best bet. I’ve been using it for a week or so and so far I have no regrets. It also imported my gjots files without a hitch, the same files that gjots itself failed to export to HTML.
Update: It’s late June and I’m still using notecase.
Update: It’s Mar 13 2008. I think I seriously underestimated Leo. I’m having another look at it now and I think I’ll come to like it.
I’ve been pursuing outliners for a long time. I agree that Notecase (actually, Notecase Pro) is the best I’ve seen. You might also try Tkoutline — a single pane outliner, although it’s not as modern as Notecase.
hadn’t noticed that the guy making Notecase introduced a commercial branch called Notecase Pro. I whish the author all the best with his project but I probably wan’t be buying the pro-version. It’s not so much the cost involved as the lost benefit of being able to update my system with a single apt-get upgrade. Thanks also for mentioning Tkoutline. I checked it out but it’s just too ugly for me :). I’m the the kind of Linux user who secretly want’s to be a Mac user.
Oh and BTW, I’m still using Notecase.
I’m pretty sure that gjots2 will both print and export.
The feature is there but it’s broken.
I did spring for the Notecase Pro version, mostly because I want to encourage this whole genre of software on Linux. No problem with apt-get upgrade, though. I have the free version from my distro’s repositories. I keep the Pro version as a separate subdirectory, and built a launcher that points to it. What I particularly liked was the ability to read in my old Tuxcards and KnowIt files, spell check, then save as Notecase format. After that, you can use the free version just as easily on the same files. The $45 bucks was worth it to me just to save the conversion time.
Did you try hnb? Console based, and dated now. But fast and full-featured.
I don’t have a history with Tuxcards or Knowit so the import features aren’t a big deal to me. Thanks for pointing out hnb. I think I’ve discarded it since it’s a command line tool. Maybe it’s worth another look. But actually I’m pretty content with Notecase.
Regarding your remarks about Leo, I would like to offer a couple of corrections.
First, I’ve been using Leo and reading its developer forums for nearly three years. At no time since January of 2005 has Leo been “not in active development.”
You are right; it is very cool. It can do lots of things that I barely understand; but it does what I want it to do extremely well.
As for its appearance, I don’t know what to say. Software is ugly when it wastes your time or doesn’t function as it should.
Anyhow thanks for an interesting post.
–KC
Ok, if leo is in active development I might have an other look it at. I’m pretty content with notecase though.
So where it to find?,
“So where it to find?”
No. I tried to go with Leo for a while. It’s clearly very powerful, and it has a small but vibrant community working on it. But the development efforts are to geekcentric, even for me. Features are being added left and right but stability and documentation are lacking.