Outlining Software

Outlining Software is designed to capture a user's data entry and let the user flexibly categorize and link the information at a later time (or do it right away as the user enters the information).

An outliner should:

allow "stream of consciousness" recording of thoughts (mind dump)
allow asynchronous organization (don't force me to organize while I think or dump)
allow different focus (HOIST in the old More terminology), meaning I should see nothing other than the node (and subnodes) I am currently concentrating on.
show me only the detail (to level depth) I want
not distinguish between structure and content (ie. don't make names or nodes different from content), and allow one to become the other easily
allow single keystroke promotion, demotion, repositioning
not get the thinker distracted by formatting issues when thinking
be fast, so that it doesn't get in the way of my thinking (dumping)

-- SamHahn?

LotusAgenda - available free; see http://web.archive.org/web/20021016195044/http://home.neo.lrun.com/pim/agendadl.htm for instructions and links. (Installing is painful, though, requiring formatting four floppies as 720K and then extracting disk images for them with a provided DOS utility.)
The built-in outliner in MicrosoftWord
TkOutline by BrianTheado (a well-known teckler); has the capability to hyperlink to other outline files; available at http://tkoutline.sourceforge.net/
GrandView? by Symantec, for DOS
ThoughtStream
TheBrain
ThinkTank by Symantec - see http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?name=ThinkTank
Acta http://www.a-sharp.com/acta - cool outliner for MacOS by DavidDunham?

LinuxOs:

orGenta - http://home.earthlink.net/~jdc24/orGenta/orGentaFeatures.htm
kJots is a simple outliner
TreeView

Yes. Ecco, by Arabesque Software (acquired by NetManage, then run into the ground, last at v4.01?) is a Win16 app I still run on XP (successfully!), that has probably the best outliner capabilities in Windows. Not the equal of More (on Mac, from Living VideoText?, derivative of ThinkTank), but acceptable. Unfortunately, a PIM cluttered the product somewhat... (SamHahn?)

Another fine Mac OS X outliner is the aptly named OmniOutliner? http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner/ and, of course, there's always EmacsOutlineMode. -- RobertDaeley

Outliners for the Palm

For the Palm: ShadowPlan? at http://codejedi.com/
Progect is another one for the Palm (it's free! :-). It's open source, available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/progect. Further info at http://www.alawa.ch/index.php?show=16&language=en&menu=0&mainlang=eo (it used to be at http://www.alawa.ch/progect_main.html.)
- Although still in development, I've been using it for about a week with no problems. It's slanted toward project management but handles outlining very well.