OPML Editor home

The OPML Editor is an outliner, an editor that works with chunks of text that slide around on rails. You can control the level of detail you look at, and reorganize according to structure. It's great for writing blog posts, technical notes, program code, legal briefs, product plans, to-do lists, entire websites, anything where ideas need organization.

See the outliner cribsheet for an idea of how outlining works.

The OPML Editor is a distribution of the open source (GPL) "Frontier" programming environment.

It can run apps written for Frontier, but it's unique in that it boots up as an outliner, ready to edit OPML documents.

This document explains how to get started.

1. Download OPML.zip, extract the OPML folder.

2. Copy it where you want it, be aware that it can't be moved after you install. The obvious choice: your Program Files folder.

3. Open the folder and launch OPML.exe. A dialog should appear asking if you want to update to get the latest code. Please do. It's a "hot" install, you don't need to quit the app to keep going.

1. Download OPML.dmg.

2. Drag the OPML folder to the Applications folder.

3. Open it and run the OPML app. A dialog should appear asking if you want to update to get the latest code. Please do. It's a "hot" install, you don't need to quit the app to keep going.

As of October 2011, the app in the OPML folder is a Universal app. You don't need to find Rosetta to run OPML.

The OPML Editor is available as an Amazon machine image. The EC2 for Poets tutorial walks you through setup.

Use this download if you want to run EC2 for Poets on another platform.

Download this folder onto any Windows 2003 Server platform, running on Amazon, Rackspace, Windows Azure, or in your living room.

static.opml.org/opmlEditor/poets/OPML.zip

You will get the almost-full EC2-For-Poets experience.

If you're already using the OPML Editor...

1. Choose Update opml.root from the File menu.

2. Quit the app and relaunch (this is needed to be sure the menubar refreshes).

That's all you need to do. You might want to visit the Preferences and Tools Catalog at the top of the Misc menu.

It boots as an outliner, but it's also a rich scripting environment, with a built-in web server, content management system, multi-threaded runtime,. It's also a development environment with a full debugger and built-in object database.

All of it is organized by the outliner. We noticed that hierarchies are all over computer systems, so having it all organized with a rich hierarchy editor made a huge amount of sense.

It's also a rich environment for running apps, which you can find on the "Tool Catalog" page.

You can leave questions or comments below.

To read about the OPML Editor, see the main howto.