Tag: OmniOutliner

OmniOutliner is an outlining app by The Omni Group. As the name suggests, it is closely related to the task management suite OmniFocus, which you probably know. However, OmniOutliner is for some reason lesser known.

This is a pity, as OmniFocus historically actually sprouted out of OmniOutliner Pro as a third party addon for GTD. Putting history aside, OmniOutliner is an excellent tool for outlining tool for Mac and iOS.

Outlines are intended lists of bullet points, a way to structure and brainstorm new project ideas, take notes in a meeting, or structure your documents.

In this article, I'll take a look at OmniOutliner and discuss how it can beat Markdown outlines or mind mapping.

Both for my day job as a researcher, as well as for this website, I often prepare papers and articles by first writing an outline. In an outline, it is easy to structure articles, re-arrange sections or subsections.

One of my favorite apps in the past has been OmniOutliner. It can export documents to text, XML, word, and others. Unfortunately, it is missing an exporter to Markdown. Luckily, there is OmniJS, the automation scripting language developed by OmniGroup.

In the following, I will showcase one way to use OmniJS, by creating a Markdown-like document from an outline, and exporting it to another app. The scripts works on both iOS and macOS.