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For anyone who thinks infinitely nested lists sounds like a good way to organize things, but would prefer an online, less editor-centric (but still keyboard friendly) tool, I recommend workflowy.com (or their more recent competitor dynalist.io who add more rich content support if that is your thing).

I've been using Workflowy for years to organize my work, both for tasks and for mental maps and note-taking. I've found that it maps extremely well to the recursive nature of my mental map of an application and it subcomponents, tasks and subtasks, and so on. And overall I find that collapsible nested lists have all the benefits of a classic 'mind map' but without the constraints and 'easier to read than edit' nature of a bubble visualization.



For me the whole point of org-mode is that the stuff in it is to valuable to trust with a vendor that stores it in a proprietary format that cant be extracted in a meaningful way if the service/company folds.


So one more note here, my open source Workflowy clone backs up all your data to a .txt file in your Dropbox every night. If my hosted service goes away, you can just run it locally, import the .txt file, and you're good to go. https://github.com/NickBusey/BulletNotes

A large part of the reason I made it was for exactly the scenario you described. I run my entire life out of it and wasn't comfortable relying on one company for it.


Nick, thank you for this, you've got another user!


Hey thank you! And please don't hesitate to create GitHub issues or let me know about any problems.


Can it be made to run locally on your machine ?


Absolutely. It's one `npm start` away.


Awesome! Starring it for this very reason (I'll probably run an instance for personal / family use, after I finish setting up the home server). I'm a big supporter of every web tool that you can self-host.


Great to hear! As far as I know no one besides myself has spun it up, so I'd love to hear how it goes!


In that case, I'm putting this on my todo list (in org mode :)) and will spin up an instance on my home dev machine somewhen in the next 10 days (I'll have an extremely busy week). I'll get back to you with the report.


Looks like something I'd really want.

FWIW, I've already cloned it and was preparing a comment to say I had done it but instead it became:

> + CategoryInfo : OperationStopped: (Couldn't find b...ball to extract:String) [], RuntimeException

> + FullyQualifiedErrorId : Couldn't find bootstrap tarball to extract

> The install of meteor was NOT successful.

> Error while running 'C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\meteor\tools\chocolateyinstall.ps1'.

> See log for details.

> Chocolatey installed 0/1 package(s). 1 package(s) failed. See the log for details (C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\logs\chocolatey.log).

Couldn't even get Meteor to install on my Windows machine.


Workflowy.com has export in 3 formats: formatted, plain text and OPML.

OPML is about as standard as you can get in that space.

It also has an option to backup to DropBox every day.

dynalist.io also allows export in plain text and OPML.


While I'm sure this won't be what you want or care about, FWIW they do offer export into plaintext that could easily be massaged into any form you'd like (I'm sure it'd take at most a line or two of lisp to get it into org-mode) and can do so daily to dropbox.


Just thought I'd mention my open source Workflowy clone, https://github.com/NickBusey/BulletNotes

It's definitely not done yet, but I've been using it as an effective replacement for Workflowy for almost a year now.


org-mode support would be awesome!


I have definitely considered this, not exactly sure what it would entail as I never really got into org-mode, started using Workflowy and then BulletNotes instead.

Do you mean just importing an org-mode file? Or an actual integration?


I meant org-mode or a subset thereof as a supported working file format.


I'll chime in with a thumbs up for checkvist.com (no affiliation, happy user). I discovered workflowy.com first but moved across as I was seduced by "try without registration", the export options - text, markdown, OPML - and the keyboard shortcuts.


Dynalist.io is a related/similar app and really awesome.


Seconded, Dynalist is like workflowy if they continued to improve the application. Totally worth moving to since workflowy is on life support


> For anyone who thinks infinitely nested lists sounds like a good way to organize things [...] I recommend

And for anyone who thinks hierarchies are an "OMG, you're joking, right?!?" inadequate way to organize thinking... :)

... any recommendations for an Org-ish app with good support for non-hierarchical full graphs, with flexible link and node types?

Writing one is on my todo list, for project management of long-term opportunistic projects, in VR, but in the meantime...


I would look at org-brain: https://github.com/Kungsgeten/org-brain

I think this is also what Emacs-Muse is supposed to do, but I have never understood that program.


> Emacs-Muse[?]

Looks more like a publishing (markdown/pandoc) solution. Abandoned 2010 as folks moved to Org.

> org-brain [inspired by TheBrain.com]

Hierarchy plus one additional link type. Org-mode integration. "One node and neighbors" presentation.

I'm struck again by how much code is about to be rewritten for VR/AR. If anyone has a programming language they wish to mainstream, here comes an opportunity to ride a selective sweep. :)


I love Workflowy. The Broadband Mechanics guys had an excellent web-based outliner. It disappeared and I've always wondered if Workflowy was built from that.


This is OT, but workflowy has a really bad website. No information at all as to what it is, just a sign up page. How did you find out about it?


Honestly, I'm kind of surprised they still exist, given the half-life of random web startups being ~3 years. Personally, I've seen them (and used for a while) back around... 2011? Don't remember what their page looked like back then, but it was quite easy to figure out.


There was a recent Indie Hackers podcast with one of the WorkFlowy founders (https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/037-jesse-patel-of-work...) where he admits marketing/user acquisition is most definitely one of his growth areas - quite a good listen.




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