I used to use PC-Outline a lot. That was a dedicated outliner for MS-DOS, written in assembler and very fast, even on an 8088-based Poqet Pc. It was shareware and Brown Bag software were significant for a few years. But they got taken over, and somewhere along the line the person who wrote it got separated from the source and it stopped getting bug fixes and printer support.
Nowadays, I write code in an outliner. The history is a bit twisty. Back in 1984-85, my current employer, a decade before I joined them, had decided that their Fortran-based product had no future and that they didn't really like any of the programming environments that were available. So they created a new one.
They were impressed with Occam and its folding editor, but the language was no good for their purposes, because transputers didn't have virtual memory or floating point (as of then). So they adopted the folding file format as a container file, with tagged folds to specify code structure and wrote an editor of their own to handle it. That was originally for VMS with VT-100 terminals, but it got ported to X-Windows, and still runs today. It isn't that powerful, so we created loadable modes for VIM and Gnu Emacs to supplement it.
I have a folded file that's my work diary. I accomplish work as a side-effect of writing things down. It has my to-do-list, my working notes on projects, all that kind of thing. There's a fold for each week, collected into months, and an archive file for each year. It works really well.
I don't get to write books any more at work. I did in a previous job, with WordStar and Ventura Publisher. Work makes me use modern Word for documents now, which is annoying, but most of them are quite short.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2024-10-12 02:17 pm (UTC)Nowadays, I write code in an outliner. The history is a bit twisty. Back in 1984-85, my current employer, a decade before I joined them, had decided that their Fortran-based product had no future and that they didn't really like any of the programming environments that were available. So they created a new one.
They were impressed with Occam and its folding editor, but the language was no good for their purposes, because transputers didn't have virtual memory or floating point (as of then). So they adopted the folding file format as a container file, with tagged folds to specify code structure and wrote an editor of their own to handle it. That was originally for VMS with VT-100 terminals, but it got ported to X-Windows, and still runs today. It isn't that powerful, so we created loadable modes for VIM and Gnu Emacs to supplement it.
I have a folded file that's my work diary. I accomplish work as a side-effect of writing things down. It has my to-do-list, my working notes on projects, all that kind of thing. There's a fold for each week, collected into months, and an archive file for each year. It works really well.
I don't get to write books any more at work. I did in a previous job, with WordStar and Ventura Publisher. Work makes me use modern Word for documents now, which is annoying, but most of them are quite short.