Kyle D. Skrinak

Outlining is a very effective way of brainstorming — capturing a lot of information randomly and then ordering the information in a more coherent manner. I find outlining indispensable at the start of projects, such as scope definition, quoting, task identification and sorting, and so on. I’ve used Microsoft Word’s outlining feature for some time now. It is easy to use, but the canned style sheets are overkill and I invariably turn them off. Additionally, keeping Word up to date has costs and it consumes a lot of computer resources. I work on avoiding resource-intensive software as they collectively slow down computer performance as the day goes on. Just because I can install 4 GB of RAM in my computer is a lousy reason for using resource-intensive software. There is another product I used and it is extremely well-designed for usability and functionality: OmniOutliner. However, I don’t use it as it’s Mac only. I would pay for it if it were open-platform.

Enter vim. Vim is small, open source, fast but, yes, the polar opposite of user-friendly. Here’s an interesting digression about user-friendly — this notion is the premise of how easy a software package is to get started on using. Regardless of the application, in short order you should be past the novice stage, or at least should be. At what point in your discipline do you “kick off the training wheels?” Anyhow, vim is cross-platform and maintains a furious development cycle. Vim is extensible, and there’s a set of scripts that combine into “vim outliner” or vimoutliner that I find fast to use. I can pop up a vimoutliner session in a terminal or in gvim on any platform.

Back to my learning-curve digression. The first mistake I made was when I treated the vimoutliner scripts and gvim as if it were GUI-based — and I was wrong. There’s just enough GUI in the gvim version to trip you up. vim is design to be GUI-less, and so is vim outliner, although the gvim version has menu items for when you forget the colon commands. Spend time with the vim tutorial firstly (time well spent) before running vim outliner.

This article got me back on the vim outliner track, here’s another learning reference and one more. Share any if you know one. Now to get back to this project proposal…