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Comment by twic | Hacker News Reader

Acta, an "outliner", which means a hierarchical text editor:

I ended up writing most of my school essays in it. You could start with a high-level outline and recursively flesh it out until you had a complete document. The tree structure made it really easy to reorder sections at any scale.

There is a successor called Opal - the last version of Acta was in 1993, and the last version of Opal was no later than 2007, so it's dead too.

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Have you considered OmniOutliner for this use case?

OmniOutliner is one of my favorite applications. I use it every day as a planner/outliner. OmniFocus grew out of OmniOutliner, and I used to be an OmniFocus user. But since I started using OmniOutliner I've completed the circle and use it for just about everything, including todolists.

Only big limitation is that it's Mac and iOS only. No web or Windows version (also, the Pro version is a bit expensive)

Have a look at DynaList (https://dynalist.io/) and Workflowy. There are apps, too.

Notion is a great outline-style hypertext editor that I use constantly: https://notion.so

Some years ago i wrote this: http://runtimeterror.com/rep/ol

I still use it at works for notes, etc although under Windows is really needs a custom lnk file to setup a fixed window size. At some point i plan on rewriting the UI bits to use a GUI instead.

You should definitely check out WorkFlowy (https://workflowy.com). It is a next generation outliner. People use it to write books and screenplays among other things.

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