Create a nested outline, collapse sections, reorder items, and export to Markdown. Your outline saves automatically in this browser.
Outline
The outline builder helps shape ideas before drafting. These features focus on nesting, collapsing, expanding, and exporting structured notes.
Press Tab to indent an item into a child position and Shift+Tab to outdent it back. Nesting creates parent-child relationships that represent the logical hierarchy of any topic — sections and sub-points, topics and supporting arguments, features and sub-features — in a visual structure that is immediately readable.
Collapse any parent item to hide its children, giving you a high-level view of the outline's top structure. Expand to drill into the detail. This is essential for long outlines where you need to focus on one section at a time without the rest of the content creating visual noise.
Move items up and down within the outline without retyping. Reordering works at all indent levels so you can rearrange both top-level sections and their nested children independently. This makes the outline a living document that evolves with your thinking rather than a fixed structure committed at the start.
Copy the outline as Markdown or download it as a .md file. The exported Markdown uses standard heading and list syntax compatible with GitHub, Notion, Obsidian, Confluence, and every other Markdown-aware platform. Nesting levels in the outline translate directly to indent levels in the Markdown output.
The outline saves automatically in this browser as you work. Use Markdown export to keep a portable backup or continue it on another device.
The Notepad button opens the notepad in a new tab so you can paste your exported outline and start drafting directly from the structure. The outline provides the skeleton; the notepad handles the prose. Export from the outline builder and import into the notepad to move from planning to writing without switching tools.
Writing without an outline is a common source of drafts that wander, repeat themselves, or fail to build toward a clear conclusion. When you write and structure at the same time, both suffer — the quality of the writing is constrained by uncertainty about what comes next, and the structure is compromised by ideas that emerge mid-paragraph and don't fit neatly into the existing flow. Separating the two tasks produces better outcomes for both.
An outline lets you evaluate the logic of an argument or the completeness of a plan before investing time in writing prose. If a section doesn't belong, removing it from an outline takes a second. Removing it after you've written three paragraphs of content for it takes much longer, and often you leave it in because you don't want to throw away the work. Outline first, and the sunk cost of bad structure is negligible.
Collapse and expand makes the outline useful throughout the writing process, not just at the start. As a draft develops, collapsing completed sections and expanding the section you are currently working on keeps the view focused. Reviewing the outline in collapsed form at any point gives you an instant test of whether the overall structure still makes sense, regardless of how much detail has been added at the nested levels.
These examples show where a visible hierarchy can help with writing, planning, studying, and project thinking before a full draft exists.
Outline the introduction hook, key arguments, supporting evidence for each, and conclusion before writing a word of prose. A well-structured outline reveals whether the argument holds together and whether the content order flows logically from the reader's perspective, not just the writer's.
Plan slides as outline items with sub-points for content within each slide. Nesting makes it easy to see at a glance whether each slide has a clear single point and supporting details, or whether it is trying to cover too much. Reorder slides instantly if the flow needs adjustment.
Spec documents often have deep structure: feature areas, requirements within each area, and acceptance criteria for each requirement. An outline builder handles this hierarchy naturally, and the Markdown export produces a spec document that renders cleanly in GitHub or any internal wiki.
Scope a project by outlining the phases, deliverables within each phase, and dependencies between them. Collapse phases that are finalized to focus on the ones in progress. Export the scope outline to Markdown and paste into a project kickoff document or issue tracker.
Long-form writing projects need outlines that can grow and reorganize over time. The outline builder's collapse feature keeps very long outlines manageable, and the reorder controls let the structure evolve as the project develops without requiring a complete rebuild.
Structure a course with modules as top-level items and lessons or topics as nested children. The outline makes it easy to see the overall curriculum at a glance, evaluate whether the progression is logical, and reorder content before materials are created — which is far easier than reorganizing after the fact.
Use this section to understand how outline levels behave and how exported Markdown preserves structure for the next writing step.
Each item in the outline builder has an indent level stored as a number from 0 (top-level) upward. Tab increments the level; Shift+Tab decrements it. The visual indentation on screen reflects the stored level precisely, so what you see is what gets exported. There is no ambiguity between the visual structure and the underlying data structure — they are the same thing.
Collapsing works on items that have children. When you collapse a parent, its children's visibility is toggled off and the parent shows a visual indicator that it has hidden children. Expanding restores the children to view. Collapsed items export just like expanded ones — the collapse state is a display preference, not a data state. This means you can collapse sections for a clean working view and still export the full outline.
The Markdown export translates indent levels to Markdown list syntax. Top-level items become top-level unordered list entries. Each indent level below adds two spaces of indentation in the Markdown output. This produces a standard nested Markdown list that renders correctly in GitHub, Notion, Confluence, and any other Markdown renderer. If you paste the export into the notepad, you can replace each outline item with a full paragraph to produce a complete first draft from the structure.
The outline-first workflow has three distinct phases. In the first phase, add items quickly without concern for order or nesting. Get all the sections, points, and sub-points into the outline before organizing them. This is the same brain-dump approach that works for the list maker — speed of capture is more important than organization at this stage, because you can reorder and nest after you have everything down.
In the second phase, nest and reorder. Indent supporting points under their parent arguments. Move sections into the order that creates the best logical flow. Collapse each section as you finish organizing it to keep the overall view clean as you work. When the outline is complete, collapse everything to the top level and review the structure. Does the sequence make sense? Is anything missing? Is any section trying to cover too much? This review pass is much faster and cheaper than doing it in a draft.
In the third phase, export the outline and move to drafting. Copy or download the Markdown and paste it into the notepad. Expand each heading or bullet into prose, and revise the structure when the draft reveals a better order.
Certain types of content always follow the same structural pattern. A case study has the same sections every time: Client Background, Problem, Solution, Implementation, Results. A product proposal always covers: Problem Statement, Proposed Solution, Success Metrics, Timeline, Resources. A technical post-mortem always has: What Happened, Root Cause, Impact, Remediation, Prevention. These skeleton structures are worth saving as macro templates with placeholder fields for the variable content.
Save the skeleton in the macros tool, fill in the specific details for each instance, and paste the result as a starting point for the outline. This approach is especially useful for teams where multiple people produce the same type of document — everyone starts from the same structure, which makes the content easier to review, compare, and archive. The consistency also trains readers to know where to look for specific information within each document type.
These answers explain nesting, collapsing, export format, local storage, and how outlines connect to the notepad.
Export your outline to the notepad and expand each section into full prose with formatting and file export.