Outline as fast as you think
Every list in the editor is an outliner — indent with Tab to nest ideas, then fold branches closed so a long note reads like a table of contents.
Long notes have a failure mode: scrolling. The meeting agenda, the project plan, the reading notes that started as ten lines are now two hundred, and finding anything means paging past everything. Dexi builds an outliner into every list — bullet, numbered, or task — so structure and focus are part of the same gesture as writing.
Press Tab to indent an item under the one above it, Shift-Tab to bring it back out (the toolbar has matching indent buttons). Any item with sub-items grows a chevron in the left margin — click it to fold that branch closed or open. From the keyboard, ⌘. (Ctrl-. on Windows) folds the item you’re in, and ⌥⌘. folds every branch in the note at once — press it again to expand them all.
Why it matters
Folding turns one note into two views: collapsed, it’s a table of contents you can scan in seconds; expanded, it’s the full detail. That means you can capture at the speed of the conversation — everything indented under the point it belongs to — and never pay for that thoroughness later, because finished branches fold away and your working set stays small.
Fold state is remembered per note, and it’s deliberately lightweight: collapsing a branch never marks the note as edited, and undo only ever reverses real changes to your text, not folds. On notes a teammate has shared with you, folding works too — collapse their note however you like to read it, without touching how they saved it.
Who gets the most out of it
- Project leads — A launch plan as a task list with nested subtasks: fold the finished workstreams and the note becomes a live status view.
- Meeting-heavy roles — Capture discussion indented under each agenda item, then fold the note down to just the agenda for the recap.
- Researchers and students — Reading notes nested by source and theme stay navigable at two hundred lines, not just twenty.
- Writers — Draft the argument as a collapsible outline first — reorder and rebalance sections while they’re still one line each.
Example: A project lead running a launch
Your launch note is a task list: five workstreams, each with a handful of subtasks, growing all week as details land in standup. By Thursday it’s too long to scan — so you stop scrolling and start folding:
- You press ⌥⌘. and the whole note collapses to five lines — one per workstream, each with a chevron and its checkbox.
- Two workstreams are fully checked off; they stay folded for good. You click open the chevron on “Marketing site” and see the three subtasks still open.
- In standup you walk the note top to bottom at the folded level, expanding only the branch being discussed.
- New tasks from the discussion go straight in: type at the end of a branch, Tab to indent under the right workstream, keep moving.
Friday’s status update is the same note, folded — you never wrote a summary, you just closed the details.
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