Hi all:

I love outliners, ever since MORE and Maxthink back in the 80's.  I am
also a passionate amateur programmer.  My favorite tool is Leo.  I want
you all to look at it.  http://leo.sourceforge.net/.  Free.  Open
Source.  Cross platform.  Python.  Author Ed K. Ream is a heck of a nice
guy and apparently, works on this baby 24/7 (!)

When coding, the outliner is invaluable.  It's not for everybody -- it's
just my style.  Nodes in my outlines can be different files -- I "save"
my work and automagically, a whole set of files is updated.  A real
powertool.

I use it as a plaintext outliner.  I use it as a "mailmerge" style text
renderer.  I don't pretend to understand "Literate programming" in total
(it's a Donald Knuth thing), but this much I get and appreciate -- I can
organize my outline so the code "reads" as if I were explaining it to
you (while Leo takes care of rendering it out so it works).  The two
sequences are very different.  "Code as literature" -- why not?  Write
for human beings and let the machines take care of themselves.

I write and maintain whole websites in Leo.  (I pretend it's Zope) :-)

Now my essay on Leo is done.  If you try it and any lights come on,
please let me know!  If you have any high powered text rendering /
templating tools (anything except XML/XSLT, which I have bounced off 100
times now) please advise!