Intrinsic (single pane) outliner

[niftyprose]

I'm posting this in case it's of use to anyone on Sparky and/or Openbox.

When I was on Mac I used outliner software extensively. I was surprised not to find a direct equivalent to my old favourite Acta when I swtiched to Linux. I prefer locally-installed software to web apps because I'm often out of mobile range, don't like extrinsic (=multipane) outliners like Treepad which separate the content from the document tree, and didn't want to rely on an abandoned project. Eventually I gave up.

Earlier this month, I devoted a couple of days to the search for an outliner. I tried everything I could google, including a number of  'personal project' offerings which I won't dwell on and the folding-text extension for GitHub's Atom extensible editor (good, but bloated). In the end I settled on TKOutliner., a project which hasn't been updated in a decade. TCL isn't exactly cutting edge, but it's readily available and provides a robust working environment. TKOutline itself is simple and effective (albeit 90s-looking) and handles various import/export requirements reasonably well.

Why I'm posting this on Sparky: part of the essence of using an outliner is to have the software quickly accessible. Launching a GUI program from the command line isn't an option. It turned out really easy to add an icon to fbpanel, so now I have a lightweight outliner that I can load in 5 secs. If anyone's havering iabout TKOutline on a modern OS, don't. worry. It's stable, and you can learn how to do the fbpanel config in 20mins.

Best, NP.