FOSSPicks
Outline editor
Leo
Leo is an integrated development environment with a wide remit. It promises to accelerate the work flow of "programmers, authors, and web designers," which it does with a rather unique design. Launching the application after a simple pip-based installation reveals a main window with three separate panes and a single tab. Everything within Leo is structured around an outline. This means your project invariably starts off as a text file written as restructured text (RST) that allows you both to write and expand your outlines intuitively as you plan your project, without having to switch contexts between creating titles and writing pages. This is what could make Leo such a good choice for authors, especially if they already use a similar process in an editor like Emacs and is also why it's useful as a personal information manager, as a wiki, or even for programmers working on large and disparate projects.
Your project's outline, represented as nodes, is shown within the top-left pane of the main window. It shows your project's structure. Select a node, and it appears in the large lower pane, which is where you can edit its contents. The top-right pane shows a log of all the activity that's taking place in your project. As with other mature editors, you have many different commands for processing the text in your project, but it's those that help you change the outline that are the most unique. By just using commands, you can move nodes around, up, and down your hierarchy. It works particularly well if you're trying to create the perfect table of contents. The clone feature is unique to Leo, and it lets you create a copy or a link from a node so that it can exist in more than one place in your structure. It's complex, but simple enough to get started.
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