Your outline

Your outline lives at /outline, and it is the one part of Comment Coach with no opinion about what you put in it. No subject, no meeting, no publication — just lines, and the shapes you make out of them. Reading notes, a talk taking form, a list of things to look up.

It is worth five minutes because two of the things it does are not in any other outliner you have used, and neither is guessable from looking at it.

Not the same thing as the outliner inside a subject, which shows a study's references, entries and comments as a tree. That one is Using the Outliner. This is your own workspace, and nothing arrives in it unless you put it there.

Start by typing

A new outline opens with a cursor and nothing else, the way a blank document does. Type a line and press Enter; you get the next line at the same level. That is the whole loop, and most of what follows is a variation on it.

Enter Start the next line, at the same level

Shift Enter Start a line underneath this one

Tab / Shift Tab Indent a line, or move it back out

Esc Stop editing, keep the line selected

F2 Edit the selected line — or click it again, or just start typing

Alt ↑ / Alt ↓ Move a line past its neighbours

Every line carries its own fold. The arrow at the left of a row hides everything under it, and each place a line appears remembers its own — which matters more than it sounds like, for the reason in the next section.

One line, two outlines

Copy a line with CtrlC and you have two ways to put it down again, and they are genuinely different things rather than two names for the same one.

Ctrl V A copy, which drifts on its own from now on

Ctrl Shift V The same line, in a second place — one text, two homes

The second one is the useful one and the surprising one. There is now a single line that appears in two outlines; edit it in either and both change, because there is only one of it. It is marked ⇄ so you are never editing a shared line without knowing. Click that marker, or choose Where else is this from the row's ⋮ menu, and you get the list of every place it lives — and you can jump to any of them.

This is why folds are per-appearance. A line can be open where it matters today and folded away in the outline you are not working in, and neither view argues with the other.

An outline as a door

An outline is itself a line, which means it can sit inside another outline. Copy an outline, go where you want it, and press CtrlShiftV.

It does not pour the other outline's contents in. You get one row with a → on it. Click that and the view re-bases onto the other outline — you have walked through a door rather than scrolled past a wall of text — and the breadcrumb along the top brings you back where you came from.

Build a few of these and the result stops being a list. A point you reach from three directions is one line, not three, and arriving at it from any of them shows you the same words.

Undoing, and going back further

CtrlZ takes back the last thing you did, including a delete, and CtrlY puts it back. This is not the browser's undo — every structural change is recorded, so it survives a reload and it knows how to reverse a move, not just retype a word.

For anything larger there is Moments. Give the moment a name before you start rearranging; going back to it takes back every change since. It costs nothing to take one, because a moment is a bookmark rather than a copy.

Going back asks first, and tells you how many changes it will undo. It has to: your lines are shared between outlines, so a revert reaches into every outline that uses them, not only the tab in front of you.

Tabs, and the two you may not have

The strip along the top is your outlines. The + makes another; double-click a tab, or press F2 on it, to rename it.

If you are running Comment Coach you will also see Comments and Notes. Those are the app's own containers rather than outlines you made — every subject from the dashboard lands in Comments — and most people do not see them.

Where to start

A new account opens with two outlines already in it, called Start here and A second outline. They explain all of the above by being it: one of their lines really is shared between them, and one really is a door. Fold them, move them, edit them, and delete them when you are done — they will not come back.

Open your outline Using the Outliner (inside a subject) All guides