Outline Tool for VIM

Toomanycats bio photo By Toomanycats

Since I started a new job, I’ve needed to outline some processes. Since I often work in a Linux environment, I might not feel like switching to my Windows machine. Plus I just really like VIM.

Github page

‘Vim outline’ Google returned “Vimoutliner”

I use Vundle so installation was trivial.

Here’s the Vundle line in my .vimrc: Plugin 'https://github.com/vimoutliner/vimoutliner.git'

Vimoutliner is really just about indenting and folding.

Title of the Outline
: author <,,t> <..d>

First Topic
    sub topic
    sub topic 2
        sub sub topic

Second Topic

HTML Output

rendered html from outline
Rendered HTML from otl file

Folding

Folding is easy in VIM:

  • zR unfold all
  • zM fold all
  • zA Toggle: (un)fold a section recursively
  • za Toggle: fold top level

There’s more but those are my main commands I use. :help fold to read more about it VIM.

There’s also so called, “comma comma commands”, which are used in command mode. ,,t puts a time stamp at the cursor and ,,d the date.

Convert to Markup The tool also comes with some handy utility scripts

which converts the otl file into something portable:

  • fs2otl
  • MediaWiki2otl
  • otl2html.py
  • otl2ooimpress.py
  • otl2table.py
  • otl2tags.py
  • otlhead
  • shell script with generating a summary of level (n)

and more.

I tend to use the html creator which is useful with email where HTML is enabled or to enable in a Wiki page.

Give it a try…