"The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order - not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries." - Umberto Eco
If you are one of those many people who use a word processor, especially Word, exclusively for all text-related tasks, you may not be aware that there are other types of tools that can process different specific types of texts far more efficiently. One such tool is an outliner, which helps you organize your ideas and tasks hierarchically as foldable bulleted lists.
I discovered the usefulness and efficiency of an outliner for managing my daily tasks more than 20 years ago when I encountered a very simple Java-based outliner called Java Outline Editor. As my frustration with Java and Java-based programs grew, I stopped using this outliner after a few years. Since then I had been looking for my ideal, one-page outliner, until I stumbled upon Dynalist this Tuesday.
This is a truly amazing crossplatform one-pane outliner who surpasses all my demands and expectations, and it's free at that! A commercial pro version is also available, but at least in the meanwhile I'm more than satisfied with the free version. If I'm to switch to the pro version, this will be mainly for supporting the developers of this incredible tool, which has already become an indispensable tool for me.
I used to use my favorite versatile text editor, EditPad Pro, for processing bulleted lists in Markdown, in which I write almost everything now. Though this superpowerful text editor highlights the syntax of this popular lightweigh markup language, it can't add folding points automatically unlike dedicated outliners.
Even if you haven't used any outliner yet, please trust me and give it a try. In the past 20 years I've tried tens of outliners, and Dynalist far exceeds all its competitors in every respect. But unlike a number of other text-related tools, this outliner doesn't have a steep learning curve. You can start using it immediately. You'll be pleasantly surprised to see how easy and useful it is.
So for what purposes can you use it? You can use it to organize any hierarchically structred texts. I, for example, use it to plan and organize my 1) daily/weekly/monthly schedule, 2) travel, and 3) lists of books I like, plan to buy, am reading now, and plan to read. Since the desktop version of Dynalist is automatically synchronized for free with its mobile version, I also use the latter for managing my shopping list on the go.