I’m sure there’s a reason for this. Maybe it’s technical debt. Maybe there’s historical precedent for this behavior. Whatever it is, the way columns work in OmniOutliner is just completely against how I expect them to work.
Honestly folks, what am I supposed to do with this? Not only are my columns ridiculous now, but it changes how resizing the window works as well.
What I expect to happen is that both columns remain anchored to the edges of the window and only the column sizes inside the window change. Is there a preference for this? Hidden or otherwise? Is this a user experience choice?
After dragging the divider left, which gives you the second image above, then click on the right edge of Column 2, and drag it to the right. That will keep the Topic column at its new, smaller size, and increase Column 2 to the larger size you want.
Because nothing else works this way? Put Finder in column view and drag the columns around. Do the same thing in Mail. Heck, even Excel works as I’ve described I expect things to work. Numbers is a little different in that a table doesn’t take up the entire window of the application, but at least in Numbers if you have a table with two columns it anchors the left column to the left side.
I’d be interested to find any other example of an application that used columns that behaved this way. Maybe another Omni app?
Alternatively, you can select the column and then open the inspector. Under ‘column type’, you should find a ‘width’ setting. Change the number to something approximating your desire, then fiddle about.
Something else you can do to simplify is to have some text in the columns that approximates how wide you want them. Then right-click on the column heading and play around with the two command… autofit and resize. They each cause similar but not identical changes.
Or, if it the column is empty, right-click on the topic column and resize. Then adjust column 2. Then autofit column 1 and it should expand to fill the window exactly…
NB It’s not obvious but technically, the topic column is actually column 2. Column 1 is the thin band to the left of it where the ‘note’ icon appears. It’s neither here nor there but if you ever use applescript to automate things it will make a difference.
