I’ve been trying to figure out how best to communicate this situation as well. I think it has to do everything with the environment I’m working in on the screen vs. the functionality of a program.
I gave up on trying to use FoldingText as an outliner not long after I first purchased it, for reasons that I think you’re previously mentioned. Many of those reasons appear to be resolved, or at least reconsidered, by the structure you’ve put in place with Atom.
While I agree FoldingText never fully worked as an outliner, it did become a great tool for keeping a journal or tracking notes around a topic. And for some types of project management – usually in conjunction with TaskPaper.
The key part of FoldingText for me is how it functioned as a writing environment with a totally unobtusive interface, formating options, and set of commands (I’m not referring to Markdown here…I rarely make use of that unless you consider the ## as markdown).
While I can do the same things in FT with Atom, there are a few elements that I currenty see as drawbacks. Using FT with Atom does have the same clean working interfaces as FoldingText 2 does, both for reading and typing as text (FT Atom is far superior as an outliner). The triangle is (for some reason I don’t understand) more obtusive than those hashmarks when used as topic headings and not as a traditional outliner. I find that instead of working in a writing environment that I can apply some outline like structure to, in Atom I instead am taking an outline structure and forcing it to act more like a standard writing environment.
There’s a difficulty in communicating this, I believe, because it’s not a question of functionality of the tool but in how a person interacts with the words they’re typing or reading on the screen. That experience is very subjective, but I believe the subjective experience is one of the hallmarks of the products you’ve developed (I’m including WriteRoom and TaskPaper). It may be difficult to codify or communicate, but I think it remains important.
I don’t know if I’ve helped clarify or further muddied this discussion. I’ll likely be returning to this topic as I continue exploring Atom and getting further clarity on what I feel I’ll be gaining and what I feel I’ll be losing. I haven’t played with the style options much yet (I’m not too strong on those parts but can usually muddle my way through). It could be that a lot of what I currently see as issues could be fixed by creating custom settings.
My apologies if this sounds initially very negative toward the changes in FoldingText. That’s not necessarily the case and I’m interested in seeing what this becomes. I think I’m more interested in what’s going to become of TaskPaper…I actually use that quite a bit more.