Dynalist
The Dynalist outliner delivers an elegant 21st century reboot to a neglected piece of 90s technology… and Will Meister gets all misty-eyed.
The Dynalist outliner delivers an elegant 21st century reboot to a neglected 90s technology... and Will Meister gets all hazy.
Since the appstore model opened the software game to all comers, developers have been trawling personal computer history for useful salvage. Outliners are one of their better rediscoveries,
Dynalist is best of breed and now it’s available for Linux as well as Android.
Outliners are specialised word processors that display pieces of writing in hierarchies from headings through subheadings down to individual paragraphs. They enable rapid shifts between collapsed ‘skeleton’ views and full text, and make possible easy reorganisation by click-dragging.
Outliners were savvy additions to early Macs and Windows PCs because of their effectiveness at editing in limited RAM. By the mid-90s, they’d gone mainstream. ( Word still has its outliner module, and the shared OPML markup language remains current.)
The popularity didn’t last. By the turn of the century, outliners languished alongside ‘mindmapping’ software and other supposed productivity enhancers.
Now outliners are back because they make it easier to edit lengthy texts on tiny screens. But Linux rose to popularity during their wilderness years. The platform has had little to offer fans beyond some out-of-date shareware and online SaaS resources like Dave Winer’s LittleOutliner.com. The decision to port Dynalist is therefore cause for celebration.
The Linux version of Dynalist is only just out of beta, and installation is a clunky process that involves unpacking a .tar file. (We untarred ours into /usr/local/
bin – very old skool.) But installation is fast and robust, with no weird dependency issues. Up and running, the UI is simple to the point of austerity, with lots of editing functions grouped on a toggle at the bottom of the window and just two menus: one for settings and account management, and the other for file operations.
Editing is absolutely seamless. Dynalist is optimised for to-dos, with handy features for checklists, strikethrus and annotations alongside Word- like formatting options, but it’s perfectly happy with longer documents. (It didn’t even hiccup when fed a 10,000 word e-book in OPML format.) But what of the main event – the outliner functions?
A single pane
Some specialist terminology is probably in order. Treepad, the best-known Linux outliner, displays the document structure separately from the text being edited, so it’s a multipane outliner. Dynalist integrates the two, so it’s a single-pane outliner.
While outliner aficionados tend to prefer single-pane offerings, they present tricky UI design challenges. On the whole, Dynalist does the single-pane thing splendidly. Entire documents can be rebuilt, munged or filleted with a few keystrokes. There’s even a handy zoom feature so you can focus on a single paragraph.
There is an interface issue, however. While the shortcuts to open help and collapse topics worked fine on a Linux box, they failed on our Android keyboard, as did our efforts at using the file ops menu to reorder our outlines. But the software remains functional and the Gemini is an unusual Android box, so we should cut the tiny development team some slack.
While we’re talking cross-platform, desktop-type users should note that, while Dynalist’s Linux port is billed as having offline capability, both versions seem happier saving straight into the Cloud. Millennials will appreciate unfussed access to their documents from multiple devices, while older users will suffer twinges of paranoia.
Dynalist follows Android convention in charging a rolling sub for a ‘pro’ version. However, since all the features described in this article are available in the free variant, the decision to install is a no-brainer. Try it and see if it doesn’t help your productivity.