clartaq

Questions about note-taking are very popular here on Hacker News. I am always interested in the responses. It seems like developers are always interested in the best tools and methodologies. Me too.

Outliners are a natural way to organize a body of knowledge.

Despite their strength at thought organization, outliners have one big weakness for me -- visibility. The headlines can get quite long when you need to record lots of information in them. Not everything can be subdivided into subheadings. Sometimes you need to write long-form text. When you do that in an outline, you can lose sight of the overall organization of the document. The long item can just expand beyond the limits of your viewing area and the rest of the outline is no longer visible to refer to.

So, after that long ramble, what to do? I've started playing with a program I'm calling `clown` (clojure outliner with notes). It works like a traditional outliner but with a second column that can display any notes attached to a particular headline. This lets me retain visibility of the bigger picture, the outliner, while still being able to drill down into very detailed information in the notes.

There's a blog post here (https://yo-dave.com/2020/01/05/clown-a-clojure/script-outliner-with-notes/) with a screenshot of what it looks like.

The app supports an outline with any number of headlines and sub headlines nested to any depth. Each headline may have an arbitrary number of notes associated with it. It's very early days, but there is a depository on GitHub (https://github.com/clartaq/clown) for anyone who wants to take a look at what I'm talking about.

So the question is: Is this a useful approach for anyone but me? Is anyone aware of something like this that has been done it the past? Any inherent problems with this approach?