techblog 

While looking for some outlining software, I came across VimOutliner (Warning: the comments system on the site seems to have been completely taken over by pornographic spam, don’t say I didn’t warn you). This is a simple plugin for Vim which gives you outlining capabilities within the editor. It may not be as slick as some of the other tools out there, but it does what you need and has the advantage of operating on plain old text files. The only problem was that I didn’t find the documentation very helpful. What I wanted was something to get me started, along the lines of “So you’ve installed VimOutliner, here’s how to use it….”. I experimented and eventually found how to use it. Looking at the help file again, everything is there, it just isn’t obvious where to start. So here’s my attempt at such a document.

Your first outline
Assuming you have installed VimOutliner, open a new file called test.otl. This file extension tells the plugin that this is an outline and so all the facilities of VimOutliner should spring into action. The basic premise of an outliner is that it lets you structure text as a series of hierarchical nodes with body text optionally below each node. To add a node you just type a line of text and press return. To add a child, press tab to indent the text. VimOutliner will add a sibling node to the last one each time you press return. To unindent (is that a word?) and move up the hierarchy, just press delete to remove the tabs it adds.

Adding body text
By default, adding a colon “:” at the start of a line turns it into body text. Note that VimOutliner takes care of wrapping the text for you, so just keep on typing that long paragraph.

Folding
VimOutliner has special commands for folding which start with 2 commas. To show only the top-level nodes, press ,,1, to show the top two levels, use ,,2 and so on.

Right, now you know enough to get started. Read the documentation for more (:help vimoutliner) or also online.

[UPDATE: Bill Powell sent me a link to this page by the author of the plugin which does a better job of explaining the basics. Seems like the correct term is ‘headline’ not ‘node’ in Outline speak]