OmniOutliner 6 public beta

[Amontillado]

It’s welcome news to hear OmniOutliner 6 is on its way to release. I was afraid OmniGroup didn’t put a priority on it.

Conventional word processors have lost their luster, which is terribly unfortunate. When I roll up my sleeves and write in earnest, there’s nothing better - my opinion, of course - than either my favorite word processor or a Markdown-driven workflow with a powerful text editor, BBEdit or, ghastly as it sounds, vim.

Outliners may be in the same boat with conventional word processors. There are too many more flexible options for outlining. Devonthink, Curio, Obsidian, Notion, Tinderbox, and a zillion other organizational tools will work well for story planning.

Like word processors, outliners still have a place. OO’s customizable columns open some nice possibilities, too.

For instance, set up OO columns for the fields in an Aeon Timeline file. A CSV export from OO will import directly into Aeon without editing.

“Plottr mode” is possible. Add a column called Thread and filter on that.

In spite of all the flexibility and hipness of more complex utilities, I’m still happy I’ve got OmniOutliner.

It would have been nice, though, to see a good old fashioned paradigm-buster. For instance, a mind map view or a story card repo. Imagine writing cards, like Plottr, in a library area, not in the outline. In outline view, either write nodes or pull in some of those story cards.

While we’re dreaming, let a story card appear in more than one place. It might be convenient to focus on chapters in outline view and see your McGuffin story card in each chapter in which it plays a part.

Curio will already do that. Make your story cards one-liner text figures with notes attachments. In a list or outline object (figure, in Curio-speak), copy the McGuffin story card as a synced text figure. There you go. An outline node pulled from a library of otherwise lost ideas.

[brookter]

@Amontillado

my opinion, of course - than either my favorite word processor or a Markdown-driven workflow with a powerful text editor, BBEdit or, ghastly as it sounds, vim.

Heresy!

There is nothing ghastly about Vim… the only thing better than it is Vim inside Emacs (which is Evil, I know…)

[cornchip]

OO6 seems a bit conservative to me, too. Hoping it’s like OF4 where the point releases are featureful. It looks like they’re doing the same unification of the view code across platforms for OO for the .0 release.

[KVZ]

I moved on from OmniOutliner many years ago. It seems fusty and twiddly; like writing documents using a spreadsheet. I probably expected too much. Dynalist is a nice simple interface, with some interesting features. Though, it’s become very pricey. Bike is OK – free with Setapp.

Katie

[Bmosbacker]

You describe my dilemma with OO. It is fiddly, like OF. My ideal would be a free or one-time purchase markdown outliner where I can easily move topics around and copy and paste into Ulysses or another markdown editor.

[vsp]

I really want OO 6 to be more like Dynalist or Bike. Especially with the absolute ease of starting out.

I’ve tried to like OO so many times over the years, but always walk away from it.

I’m signing up for the TestFlight anyways. I’d love to be happily surprised by it.

[Amontillado]

OO’s row styles were initially a mystery to me. They aren’t really that bad and you rarely have to use them.

To me, OO works like Bike. Control-command-arrow to move topics around just like in Bike’s video. Select a block of items and move the block the same way. Enter to create a new child. Command-’ to start entering a note, which thankfully creates line breaks with return. Command-return to exit the note. Tab/shift-tab to indent or outdent.

Select-all and copy, paste into iA Writer to get a Markdown formatted outline.

Given a choice between Bike and OO, with great deference to Bike’s lean-and-mean approach, I’ll reach for OmniOutliner every time, even if I don’t use extra columns. But that’s just me.

[Bmosbacker]

@Amontillado

Select-all and copy, paste into iA Writer to get a Markdown formatted outline.

But I don’t get a markdown-formatted outline. I get an outline with lots of dashes. This requires me to go through and add the appropriate hashtag levels. And export does not show markdown as an option. Am I missing something?

• Faith, Formation, and the Future: Integrating AI into the Life and Work of Westminster Christian Academy
  • Purpose & Introduction
    • Purpose of This Paper
    • Introduction
    • Use of AI in Writing This Paper
  • Biblical & Theological Foundations
    • Technology as God’s Gift
    • Man in the Image of God
    • Stewardship and Love of Neighbor
    • Using Technology for God’s Glory
    • Forming a Biblical Vision for AI
  • Understanding AI
    • Concepts and Definitions
    • History and Milestones
    • Current Uses and Emerging Trends
    • Key Shifts in 2025
    • Top AI-Era Skills
  • Educational Philosophy and AI
    • AI and WCA’s Philosophy, Objectives, Values
    • Framework: Faith, Formation, Future
  • Formation in Christ in an AI World
    • Commencing With Christ
    • Common Call
    • Christ’s Kingdom Call
    • Curriculum
    • Community
    • Character
    • Consecration
    • Culminating in Christ
  • Practical Application at WCA
    • Guidelines for Teachers, Students, Staff
    • Authenticity, Creativity, and Assessment
    • Curriculum Implications
    • Professional Development and Productivity
    • Ethical Use: Guardrails for AI
  • Governance & Leadership
    • Leading WCA in an AI World
    • Board & Parent Partnership
    • Policy Framework
  • Conclusion
  • Appendix
    • Case Studies
    • Resources
    • Key Terms
    • Endnotes

[Amontillado]

If you turn on row numbering in OO with the option to add a dot after the row number, it will paste as a numbered list.

Alternatively, you could paste the “-” list and replace the first dash on each line.

In BBEdit, search for:

(?P<a>\s*)\-

and replace with

\P<a>1.

The unnumbered list will then be numbered.

Where there’s a will there’s a way, and Markdown is cool!

[Bmosbacker]

@Amontillado

Alternatively, you could paste the “-” list and replace the first dash on each line.

In BBEdit, search for:

(?P<a>\s*)\-

I appreciate your kindness and help, but you are now above my technical skill level and pay grade. I don’t use BBEdit and know nothing about HTML. Also, while I could easily replace a dash with hashtags, that becomes a very manual process when I have many subheadings. I tried adding hashtags at the beginning of each topic line in OmniOutliner. While this adds the hashtags, I still end up with many unneeded tab spaces that I would have to delete manually, as shown below.

The one option I have found is MindNode. It works, but the outliner is not great.

Thanks for trying to help, much appreciated!

[Celsius1414]

I downloaded Zavala a while back but just recently started to try it out. Seems like it might fit the bill, or at least be worth a look, for a simple cross-platform (in the Apple ecosystem sense) outliner.

[Amontillado]

That wasn’t HTML, it was regular expressions:

(?P<a>\s*)\-

That’s the seach string. The parentheses are to capture a group. The pattern is backslash-s-star, or any space characters, tabs or spaces, repeated zero or more times.

The first part, the ?P part, says we want to name this captured sequence “a”.

The replacement says to replace whatever was found with the sequence named “a” (the leading spaces, if any), and “1.”.

You don’t have to name captured sequences, in which case you refer to them as \1, ,\2, etc. Unfortunately, if you want to include the first numbered group followed by a one, \11 gets interpreted as group number eleven, not group one followed by a literal “1” character.

Every line in a numbered list in Markdown is formed with any number-dot.
When it’s rendered, it fixes the numbers.

I think the space indentation is hard-coded in OO. We could fix that with further regular expressions but I’m ready to agree with you - the geekology is getting ridiculous!

[brookter]

Apologies if you already know this… Assuming that list is the one you’ve copied from iA Writer, then it’s a simple two level list which is easily convertible with iA Writer’s own find and replace – no need for regular expressions (which are brilliant, but they’re overkill in this situation, I think).

All you should need to is

1. Copy and item from the lowest level list from immediately before the first word to the left margin (i.e. copy everything from the margin including the bullet and the space/tab after it) and paste it into the ‘Find’ field.
2. Enter ## (including the space) into the Replace field and press All. (Obviously, use the right number of # for that level!)

Then repeat for the all the other levels, working your way up from lowest to highest. (Doing the lower levels first simplifies things because otherwise you can falsely match other levels).

I’m not sure you’d want to do this twenty times a day, but as the occasional exercise, it only takes a minute or two, if that.

HTH

[Bmosbacker]

TThank you. Yes, I have used Find and Replace frequently. The problem is that replacing the dash or even a hashtag (if used in front of outline topic sentences) still leaves one or more tabs in front of the hashtags when pasted to iA Writer or Ulysses.

However, I decided to experiment and found a solution. Using the typical Find and Replace works easily for replacing symbols or letters. The trick is figuring out how to replace the tab spaces, specifically, how to add tab spaces in “find” so they can be replaced with nothing (which is what you want in an application like Ulysses). I discovered how to replace the tab in the Find and Replace function:

• Select and copy the hashtag(s) or other symbols you want to replace on each topic line in the document.
• Paste into the find field.
• Insert the cursor at the beginning of what was pasted in the find field, hold down the Option key, and press tab for the number of tab spaces to be deleted. (This is necessary because tab spaces do not copy and paste. You have to enter them in the find field, but doing so requires using the Option key.)
• Enter the hashtags needed in the replace field.
• Select and Replace All.

Following that process will delete both the unwanted tab spaces and other symbols and letters as needed.

So, though I have am a frequent user of Find and Replace, your suggestion caused me to experiment a bit and I was able to find a solution—so—Thank you!!

[brookter]

Actually, the reason I suggested you copy back from the first ‘real’ letter to the left margin (in iA Writer) is precisely because that avoids you having to worry about whether the indent is made out of tabs or spaces – whichever is being used, they’re included in the copy/paste already.

There are occasions when you do need to add the tab etc but it wasn’t necessary for me in this case.

[I’ve just rechecked, to be absolutely sure I wasn’t misleading you, but for me, tabs are included in copy and paste in iA Writer. But checking in Ulysses, it seems that it’s doing something strange with the tabs, so that may be a bug in Ulysses?]

HTH

[Bmosbacker]

Yes, I believe this is unique to Ulysses—which is what I use for my book and white paper project. Ulysses uses a propriety form of markdown-which has advantages and disadvantages. Thanks again for you kind help!!

[Amontillado]

Apologies - you said hashtags which I conflated to mean level numbering.

Like Mrs. Clark said way back in second grade, read the word problem twice before blurting out an answer.

[Bmosbacker]

No apology needed, you have been very kind and helpful and it is appreciated!

[Amontillado]

I see the latest OO 6 beta addresses the problems I’d noticed. It’s pretty much behaving well for me at this point.

[JensV]

I was happy to realize they added automatic them switching from light to dark mode and vice versa.

Other then that the app looks and feels „conservative“ to me at this stage - but well, it’s a beta, maybe they start with the „fun stuff“ once the universal base is finished .