An outliner, driven from the keyboard OUTLINE

An outline is not a bulleted list

The difference is that the structure is live. A point can be pushed a level deeper, pulled back up, or moved with everything underneath it, from the keyboard, without touching the mouse and without retyping anything. A bulleted list in a word processor looks the same and does none of that: moving a heading leaves its children behind.

That single property is why outliners were how long documents got written for twenty years, and losing it is why people now write long documents by scrolling: holding the shape in their head, hunting for the section that should come earlier, and cutting and pasting blocks with the risk that comes with it.

Four keys, and that is the whole tool

• Tab pushes a line one level deeper.
• Shift-Tab pulls it back, and takes everything under it along, because a heading that moves without its children is a heading that has lost them.
• Alt and the arrows move a line and its whole subtree up or down the document.
• Enter starts the next line at the same level.

There is nothing else to learn, and the four together are the thing: you can reorganise an argument as fast as you can think about it, which means you find out what the document should look like while you are still cheap to change. By the time a structure is expressed in formatted paragraphs it has become expensive to rearrange, and people stop rearranging it, which is how documents end up in the order they happened to be written in.

Write the outline before the prose

The reason to work this way is that structure and sentences use different parts of your attention, and doing both at once means doing both badly. A page of headings tells you in thirty seconds that section four repeats section two and that the conclusion has no evidence under it. The same page written out as prose takes twenty minutes to read and the repetition is invisible, because each instance reads perfectly well on its own.

So get the shape right while moving a section costs one keystroke. Then write. The export is markdown, numbered, or indented text: markdown if the outline is becoming a document, numbered if somebody has to refer to section 3.2 in a meeting, plain indented if it is going into an email.

It is worth knowing the implementation, because it explains a limitation: this is a flat list of lines each carrying a depth, not a tree. That is why the keys are instant and why nothing can get into an inconsistent state, and it is why a line cannot be more than one level deeper than the line above it. In practice that is the rule you would want anyway: a document with a jump from a first-level heading to a third-level one has a missing heading.

Everything stays in this browser and nothing is uploaded. Alongside: BRIEF is about writing something that survives being passed on, PLAIN finds the sentence a reader stops at once the prose exists, and Docs takes over when the outline becomes a document.