
Vimflowy – A productivity tool drawing inspiration from Workflowy and Vim - maelito
https://github.com/WuTheFWasThat/vimflowy
======
wuthefwasthat
Author here! Didn't see this coming - time to update all the documentation :)

Thanks for the comments, everyone, and feel free to ask questions here.

Some background: I started working on Vimflowy after a conversation with a
friend. I'd seen many similar apps, but the vim part was important to me. I've
tried the spacemacs org layer, but it didn't work out. My friend had a _huge_
document on Workflowy which started getting laggy for him. Vimflowy lazy
loads, and deleting and pasting large subtrees is efficient, which went well
with the vim concept. So it started out being a tool mainly for me and my
friend. At this point, I'd be happy if others found Vimflowy useful, though I
don't have grand aspirations for it. I've tried to make it so that developers
can customize it to their liking without much trouble. I would consider making
a second set of non-vim bindings out of the box if enough people seem to like
it - it'd be relatively easy to implement, but the space seems crowded enough
as is.

~~~
shanusmagnus
This thing is amazing, and so close to something I've been wanting for a while
now that it's like you've been eavesdropping! Thanks so much for making it
available for others to use and learn from.

I'm looking forward to studying the code to learn how you built it. If you
ever have time, I think a bit of architectural overview / design discussion
would make a nice addition to the README.

~~~
wuthefwasthat
Yeah, I'd add it if it helps other developers get started with the code base.
Happy to chat with you about it, though, too! Feel free to email me.

That said, I'm not sure there's anything particularly interesting or good
about the architecture though - in fact certain things I know are probably
badly designed

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skummetmaelk
I encourage everyone who likes this to take a look at org-mode for emacs. With
evil-mode you get vim keybindings and org-mode has many many many features in
the same line as vimflowy appears to.

~~~
fiatjaf
Every time someone talks about anything related to org-mode a ton of comments
mentioning org-mode appear.

~~~
bitexploder
Passionate user base. For good reason IMO. Never needed a TODO app or
"productivity" suite. Plain text. Never going to worry about vendor lock in.
Put it on Dropbox or whatever if you want "cloud" stuff. And once you use it a
while it rewards you with depth and features. You can take your notes and do
so much with them. It is a rich ecosystem. I think other tools should always
give it a try,Ike Vimflowy though.

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laktak
Vimflowy doesn't say what it does so I checked Workflowy - but this also
doesn't say what it does.

~~~
tedmiston
Infinitely nestable lists of items where each item can be a note, todo, or
project.

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rayalez
Oh, this is really cool!

I love the vim shortcuts, but it would be really cool to be able to customize
this. Or at least allow to use Ctrl+Key, without the modes, that would really
make it easier for non-vim users to adopt.

I'm actually working on a similar project(just deployed an alpha yesterday), I
think you might find it interesting:

[https://nulis.io](https://nulis.io)

~~~
nnq
Looks a lot like [https://gingkoapp.com/](https://gingkoapp.com/) . Any
connection?

Is this a better or open-source alternative to it?

~~~
rayalez
Gingkoapp is general(academic papers, gtd, etc), Nulis is focused on fiction
writing.

I write stories and screenplays, and while gingko is awesome, I need many
features it doesn't have(editing all the cards at once like a big text
document, writing stats and word targets, good fullscreen editor, custom
templates, fountain markup, color coded cards, collapsing branches, outline-
view, saving files locally, a desktop version, a bunch of other things).

Nulis is in it's very-very early version, I've just barely deployed it, but I
do think that it's going to be much better for writing fiction.

I would really love to open source it, but for now having a viable business
model is a must, I need it so I could afford to make Nulis as good as I want
it to be. If I figure out how to make it work despite being open source, or
develop it to the point where it benefits more from being open source than
not, I'll gladly do that.

It's possible that I will set up a patreon, and open source it once it reaches
enough donations to become sustainable.

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desireco42
This is a problem with any outline tool :). Essentially people will glance at
it, without exploring will tell you their favorite outliner that they are
secretly dissatisfied with. Unless you can get someone super famous to promote
it, it is hard to get any traction, no matter how good it is.

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stanislavb
Nice work! I've been a huge fan of workflowy for quite a lot of time (and
VIM), and this seems like a very interesting project. Cheers!

p.s. kudos for open sourcing it

~~~
pps
You can also try dynalist, it's like workflowy, but with a lot more features.
(you can import there your workflowy notes and start with that)

~~~
paradite
Nice. I have been wanting the due date feature for a long time on workflowy.
There seems to be no development for workflowy beyond what was available a few
years ago.

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tedmiston
If you are a Mac user looking for a native app that's similar to this or
Workflowy, FoldingText is amazing.

[http://www.foldingtext.com/](http://www.foldingtext.com/)

~~~
desireco42
I find Outlinely nicer /w themes and also cheaper ...

[https://glamdevelopment.com/outlinely](https://glamdevelopment.com/outlinely)

I am retracting cheaper statement, it seems it is now $40. Probably better for
sustainable development, I got it on sale for $10, it is great tool.

~~~
tedmiston
Looks interesting, perhaps a little more GUI than I usually like but I'll give
that a look. Being able to use it on mobile would be nice.

Not sure if I got on a dev or beta channel or something but I've been using
FoldingText for free for a long time. It's never disabled features or promoted
a purchase.

------
Plugawy
Funny how these things come and go - I made a workflowy inspired plugin for
Vim
[https://github.com/lukaszkorecki/workflowish](https://github.com/lukaszkorecki/workflowish)

Little did I know I was re-inventing org-mode

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r3bl
Hmmm... can't figure out a way to remove tips from the right sidebar. Any
ideas?

Other than that, this seems like a great mashup between Markdown and Vim. I'm
leaning towards the Markdown side of things, but can definitely see myself
overwriting new tab page with this tool and using it regularly, especially
since it stores the data locally by default.

ownCloud / Nextcloud sync would definitely be the feature that would make me
use this tool all the time.

~~~
wuthefwasthat
I made ? a bit more discoverable. Thanks for the feedback!

It's pretty easy to experiment with a new data backend, as long as it's easy
to implement GET and SET for a key-value store on top of it. It took me less
than an hour to get the first version of Firebase working. Most of the work
would be implementing the auth, UI, documentation. I've planned on
experimenting with Dropbox/OwnCloud/etc at some point

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fiatjaf
Using vim keybindings and modes is the perfect solution for this kind of tool.
Workflowy could be so better and have so many features if it had powerful
modes like vim!

Like, for example, [http://calculist.io/](http://calculist.io/), that
implements a ton of magic features on top of a thin Workflowy-like UI, but
struggles with UX and keybindings.

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jaaames
Holy shit this is amazing.

Elegant, simple, powerful, web based.

Have deployed to Heroku/Firebase and will give this a solid try for personal
and work notes.

~~~
wuthefwasthat
Let me know how it goes!

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raajg
Really cool project - and thanks for open-sourcing it. For a couple of years I
had used Emacs and the one tool that I really miss is 'org mode'. After
switching back to VIM I have tried different plugins but none get even a
little closer to what you can do in org-mode.

This project looks promising and I'm giving it a try

~~~
wuthefwasthat
You're welcome! Let me know what you end up thinking. I'm quite curious, since
I came from a similar situation as you, but went less far with org mode (I've
tried the spacemacs org-mode layer but didn't like it that much).

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fiatjaf
See also [http://calculist.io/](http://calculist.io/)

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ivanzhao
If you are looking for one that supports Markdown, rich media, and with
dedicated Mac/Windows app:

[https://notion.so](https://notion.so)

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raajg
Love the cloning feature! Haven't seen it in other tools.

~~~
wuthefwasthat
It basically comes for free if you implement the tree operations efficiently
:)

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milin
Also VimWiki

~~~
anaximander
To expand on this: I use VimWiki daily and it's been a really great way to
keep myself organized. Being able to easily hyperlink and jump between
documents makes navigating the document hierarchy very straightforward. I have
VimWiki set up to integrate with Taskwarrior, so I can create and manage tasks
right from Vim and everything gets persisted in a Taskwarrior file, which I
can then use to generate reports or otherwise manipulate via standard
Taskwarrior commands. Creating/managing tabular data has never been easier in
Vim with the help of VimWiki. The list goes on; I really can't sing its
praises enough!

~~~
dotancohen
Could you share your config and workflow? I'm a heavy Vim user and I've
dabbled with VimWiki and Taskwarrior but never got proficient with them.

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robinhoodexe
I cannot use "$" to go to end of line to work. Also, when holding down "h" it
does't scroll.

Other wise very nice!

~~~
wuthefwasthat
Those both work for me. What browser are you using? (Are you using vimium or
vimperator maybe?)

~~~
robinhoodexe
Safari 10.1 on OS X 10.11.6

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pankajdoharey
Nice, Workflowy with Vim key bindings. Surely Workflowy itself can give
support for it.

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erikb
What is all this? Is it like org mode?

