Excursus » Outliner

Ted Goranson Returns

Mark Eli Kalderon — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 22:46:07 +0000

At least for this month. About This Particular Outliner last appeared in November 2006. The promised review of writing applications on OS X has not surfaced, but something perhaps even more exciting has:

It’s time for a major advance, and guess what? After daydreaming, designing, and proposing, I am now actually building something. It’s risky, it’s ambitious, and there will be parts we’ll have to adjust as we go. But I do think it’s a huge leap in the power of conceptual tools for personal and collaborative use.

I can’t say much at this point, but it is a media outliner, meaning you should be able to outline within media. It’s Web-based. It does some things you’ve never seen before. We hope to make it free. Stay tuned. You will hear it first in ATPO.

Folding Text

Mark Eli Kalderon — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 19:26:24 +0000

Code folding is a feature of some text editors that allows the selective hiding and displaying of the text being edited. This is particularly useful if you are working on a small subsection of a large, complicated text. Code folding allows you to display and work on the relevant portion of the text while hiding the rest. It also allows you to view the structure of the text by hiding irrelevant details. While primarily a feature of programmer’s editors and IDEs, it is easy to see how this feature can be useful to writers as well.

There are a variety of ways to implement code folding. Sometimes special delimiters are used to mark where in the text the fold is to occur; other times the folding is syntax-based. If the implementation of code folding is syntax-based, then this feature will only be useful for writing if you are using some form of structural markup such as LaTeX or DocBook.

Developed in the 70s in the Lisp community, code folding editors are the ancestor of outliners, such as OmniOutliner and TAO. (For some of the hitory of outliners see Outliners.com, Dave Winer’s history of More and Ted Goranson’s column About This Particular Outliner.) The expanding and collapsing file system viewer that first appeared in MacIntosh System 7 was an abstraction of the code folding UI, an abstraction that informs the UI of a variety of programs today.

As I posted earlier, BBEdit 8.7 features improved code folding. Following on the heals of this, TextMate revision 1413 offers a small refinement to its folding GUI:

[CHANGED] The right-pointing folding arrow is another color to make it visually distinct from the up/down arrows. Thanks to Paul Howson.

The visual distinction is a nice detail. Not everyone, however, was thrilled with the implementation:

It’s not just that the orange is garish (it is), but it is sufficiently loud to drown out the gray down arrow. Thomas Aylott of subtleGradient, benevolent soul that he is, has answered the howls of protest on the mailing list with a customized nib and png files that provided a more muted contrasting gray for the right arrow. The results can be viewed here and the files can be downloaded here. Thanks, Thomas, for teh awesomeness!

ATPM on Activity Monitor

Mark Eli Kalderon — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 02:34:03 +0000

As I mentioned in my initial post, learning about the UNIX underpinnings of OS X was a revelation. While I would never like to work exclusively in a text based terminal, a lot of UNIX utilities can be exploited by writers as well as coders. While visual editing familiar from word processors tends to obscure the semantic structure of complex documents, the GUI has its place even in the manipulation of text. There is an interesting class of applications that I like to think of as hybrid apps. The least interesting of these are merely GUI wrappers of command line utilities. Others, however, add value to these utilities by allowing the user to interact with them in novel and useful ways. One example that deserves special mention is Apple’s FileMerge that allows for the visual comparison of text files. I will be blogging more about FileMerge, but for now, here is a screenshot:

Another hybrid application from Apple is Activity Monitor:

Of course a lot of the information displayed by Activity Monitor can be accessed by top in the terminal, but there’s more besides. In a How To article in About This Particular MacIntosh Sylester Roque begins the first part of a review of the Activity Monitor. Check it out to get a sense of the potential of this underappreciated utility.

While on the topic of ATPM, Ted Goranson in his column about outliners (text editors that allow multiple views of a document based on its logical structure), will be writing about writing environments next month. If you are not yet familiar with this fascinating column, the archives are a rewarding read.