You can view and edit files as outlines in beorg. Long-press an item on the Agenda or Tasks tab and select Open With Outliner…. You can also select the file itself from the files tab.
What is an outline?
A file is shown as an outline. An outline is an organised hierarchy of text. You may sometimes see items in an outline referred to as nodes. An item can contain other items, known as its children. A headline can also contain text. Here is an example of what beorg writes when you save a file you’ve been working on:
* Headline 1
** Headline 1.1
Some text belonging to headline 1.1
** Headline 1.2
* Headline 2
Folding
beorg allows you to fold (that is show/hide its children) an item in the outline. To show or hide the children of an item tap on the left hand side of the screen on the headline. You can see if an item has its children hidden because it will contain a triangle pointing right. If its children are shown then the triangle will point down. An item with no children will show as an empty circle.
Editing tools
As well as viewing files you can also edit files. To edit an existing item tap on the right side of the screen on the headline. So you can see which item is being edited a blue line will appear on its left.
The top set of icons in the edit area are as follows:
- Hide the editor
- Demote an item (that is make an item a child of the item above)
- Promote an item (that is make it a higher level heading)
- Move an item up
- Move an item down
- Add an item below the current selection
- Add an item above the current selection
- Delete the item
You should experiment with these tools before using on an important file.
Below these tools is a switch between editing the item’s headline and editing the text underneath the headline (sometimes referred to as notes):
When editing an item’s headline there are some additional buttons and information which appears:
- The state of the item. An item can be marked as TODO, DONE or a custom state you’ve configured in settings. If an item is in a done state then the box shown will contain a tick.
- Priority. An item’s priority is a letter between A and G. An item with a priority of A will appear higher up the list of items in the agenda than one with a priority of D. An item with no priority will appear below those items with a priority.
- Tags. You can add or remove tags from that item. Tags are useful when searching lots of items or using saved searches.
- Scheduled date and time.
- Deadline.
- Show on date, or when this item should appear in the agenda but won’t then be shown as overdue if that date passes.
- Show the item editor.
You can add a new item to the bottom of the document by tapping the Add Item button.
Exporting an outline
You can view a file as formatted text by tapping the button at the top right of the screen. If you want to view just part of an outline as text long press the item and choose Export from the popup menu. The formatted view of the document or subtree can be exported as a PDF for printing or sharing via an app.
Copy/paste
The beorg outliner supports copy and paste. Long press on an item in the outline to show the menu.
When you copy an item it copies the item and any children as a single plain text snippet. You can paste this text into other apps or into a different place in the outline.
When pasting you can choose to:
- Paste above the currently selected item
- Paste below the currently selected item
- Paste as the last child inside a selected item
If beorg does not recognise what is on the clipboard as being in Org mode format then it will ask if you want to paste as a single item or as a list. For example if you had the following in the clipboard:
Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
and pasted that text as a single item then the item would be given the headline or title Line 1 and the notes would be set to:
Line 2
Line 3
If however you selected to paste as a list then beorg would add three separate items into the outline:
- Line 1
- Line 2
- Line 3
beorg will also intelligently recognize if you try pasting OPML content. OPML is an XML file format used by most outliners. If you copy some OPML contents to the clipboard and paste into beorg the structure of the pasted content will be retained. This is useful if importing content from apps such as MindNode.
