Fargo outliner (works with Dropbox)

At first sight, Fargo is a Web page with a smallish triangle icon below a simple menu bar. One writes in Fargo as one writes elsewhere, by clicking on the screen and typing: text appears to the right of the triangle. When you hit Return, a new triangle appears below, another line in the outline. If you hit Tab, that line will bump over a bit and become subordinate to the line above. Shift + Tab returns you to a higher rung of the hierarchy. Thus are built trees—and, Winer hopes, forests.

“I want a space that they can share,” Winer says, referring to the writers, designers, and programmers who he hopes will form a Fargo community; he talks respectfully about “outliner people.” “The people I really like,” he says, “are people who are aware of their own intellectual processes—those are the only people you can explain the benefits of outlining to. Normal people, even very intelligent normal people, don’t think in terms of wanting to buy a tool that helps them organize their intellectual work better.”

It’s an elitist view of software, and maybe self-defeating. Perhaps most users, who just want to compose two-page documents and quick e-mails, don’t need the structure that Fargo imposes.

But I sympathize with Winer. I’m an outliner person. I’ve used many outliners over the decades. Right now, my favorite is the open-source Org-mode in the Emacs text editor. Learning an outliner’s commands is a pleasure, because the payoff—the ability to distill a bubbling cauldron of thought into a list, and then to expand that bulleted list into an essay, a report, anything—is worth it. An outliner treats a text as a set of Lego bricks to be pulled apart and reassembled until the most pleasing structure is found.

Fargo is an excellent outline editor, and it’s innovative because it’s a true Web application, running all its code inside the browser and storing versions of files in Dropbox. (Winer also recently released Concord, the outlining engine inside Fargo, under a free software license so that any developer can insert an outline into any Web application.) As you move words and ideas around, Fargo feels jaunty. Click on one of those lines in your outline and drag it, and arrows show you where else in the hierarchy that line might fit. They’re good arrows: fat, clear, obvious, informative. (end excerpt)