Future plans

I use tkoutline on a daily basis and find it rather stable, but it does have several Missing features.

Last updated 15-Jan-05:

Likely in next release

• Undo and redo functionality
• Improved Tkoutline plugin architecture
• Easier ways to close outlines (i.e. keybinding, etc.). See tkoutline discussion and [1]
• Default .tko file extension when saving

Shorter-term/probably

• Incremental search
• Keyboard shortcut and icon for closing an outline
• Use Unicode characters for bullets instead of images

Longer-term/maybe

• When selecting a range of text, keep the selection tag off the bullets
• Configurable initial title text for a node
• Export to latex
• More web-browser like functionality (forward, back, open in new tab)
• Numbering of outline elements
• Ability to seamlessly edit text files and opml files without having to import and export
• Have a distinction between headline text and body text (see Headline vs body text discussion)
• Printing from within tkoutline
• Spell checker
• Launching tkoutline from the OS multiple times could be intercepted by tkoutline and result in a new outline tab instead of a new instance of tkoutline.
• Per-level font configuration
• GUI to Edit per-node attributes
• Visual cue for attributes
• Ability to edit attributes in columns (see also Columns and filter functionality)
• Tcl/Tk browser plugin
• Curses based tkoutline
• Single/double/triple pane display modes
• Improve outline widget API to it is more widget-like (i.e. configure and cget methods)
• Most operations use the single node that contains the insertion cursor. Some like copy and cut work with all the node containing the selection. More operations should work with multiple selected nodes.

Ideas

• Convert the contents of this wiki into a set of hyperlinked outlines and include the results as part of the tkoutline distribution.
• [tkoutline as an rss reader]
• Somehow allow for inline expansion of inter-outline hyperlinks. Combined with some sort of hoist/dehoist functionality, it might be an interesting way to organize information.
• Export outlines in rtf in order to preserve bold, italic, strike etc. to include in word or other rtf enabled editor.

Old future plans

Shared persistent outlines - 11/10/02 - I'm no longer pursuing this

Outline as a hierarchy of database queries: = 11/10/02 - I'm no longer pursuing this

Another future plan I have is to add functionality to treat an Outline as a hierarchy of database queries. This will allow the structure of the outline to be much more flexible than a rigid tree structure. 02/10/02 - I have an off-line batch mode version of this working (see the above link). I expect it may take 6 months to a year to have a more dynamic and usable version available.

More wiki-like features --Implemented in version 0.77

Support for hyperlinking outlines together already exists in version 0.65. I plan to add support for external hyperlinks and other wiki markup such as bold and italics.

Performance improvements --Implemented in version 0.77

Version 0.65 is significantly slower than version 0.61 as far as displaying outlines. Saving large outlines has always been slow. I plan to improve the performance of both.

A wiki of outlines -- Implemented in version 0.65

Another idea I have is to allow wiki link syntax to be used in tkoutline to hyperlink outlines together. This would be like a local mode wikit [2], but each page would be an outline instead of a page of flat text. See Wiki-like hyperlinked outlines. NOTE: I attempted to access that last Wiki reference, and got a server error... 05/20/02 I am unable to duplicate this error. Please send the error message to mailto://btheado@users.sourceforge.net if you see it again

XOTcl rewrite: -- Indefinitely on hold. I'm having enough fun reworking the straight Tcl code.

I have started a complete, from-scratch rewrite using a cool object oriented extension of Tcl called XOTcl [3]. One disadvantage of this is tkoutline will no longer be a pure Tcl/Tk app (since XOTcl is a C based extension). The advantages are that it better holds my interest and it will be easier to add new features that I want. 02/10/02 - Development on this rewrite has stalled, but I expect to come back to it at some point.

Updated 11 May 2005, 01:22 GMT Search - Recent Changes - 4 References - About WiKit - Go to Tkoutline - Help