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rochus-keller
CrossLine
C++2020–2026
rochus-keller / CrossLine

CrossLine

CrossLine is an outliner with sophisticated cross-link capabilities in the tradition of the well-respected Ecco Pro

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4Distinct people
32Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
177GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

CrossLine is an outliner with sophisticated cross-link capabilities in the tradition of the well-respected Ecco Pro

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year32 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-03-03 13:32:57 UTC to 2026-05-28 16:34:16 UTC.

02462020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

32 sources
Rochus·Jan 3, 2025
> It's reminiscent of Luhmann's original zettelkasten system, where physical proximity created a kind of "neighbor effect" that digital systems struggle to replicate. That's what outliners are good for. You automatically generate context and proximity when adding/indenting outline items. And we have the thing called hypertext for cross-referencing and navigation. I think Luhmann's zettelkasten is a quite poor concept in comparison, because the cards are small and don't adjust to the size of a topic, so we have to split topics, and we have to take care of identification and referencing the cards ourselves. When translating zettelkasten to digital, then at least we can get rid of some of these limitations, but we still don't have all the advantages of outliners. In my experience, it is purely a matter of habit whether you write down ideas o
Read the rest
r thoughts by hand on paper or enter them directly into an outline on the computer. Before I had tools like Ecco or my own CrossLine (https://github.com/rochus-keller/crossline/), I also produced a lot of notes on paper. After a few years of working with these tools, I got rid of paper completely. With CrossLine, I also solved the problem of linking to other documents or emails, so that I can link any information or put it in the necessary context. And it scales well. I have outline files with thousands of notes, minutes, concepts, specifications and the like, everything cross-referenced and full-text searchable. I can still reproduce e.g. meetings or paths to decicions taken ten or more years ago with little effort.
In Building a Knowledge System That Enhances Rather Than Replaces Thought
Rochus·Oct 2, 2024
Have a look at https://github.com/rochus-keller/crossline/. I use it for the mentioned purpose (besides Cycling/GPX) since more than a decade. Originally I used Netmanage Ecco, which was discontinued and didn't support all features I needed (i.e. cross-references, more than one outline, etc.). It has an integrated database using the SQLite backend on top of which I implemented a kind of object database (extended entity-value). It's written in C++ and "hackable".
In Ask HN: Hackable Personal Database?
walterbell·May 25, 2024
Used by small law firms, Ecco Pro (built by 4 people in Bellevue, WA) was killed by Outlook, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecco_Pro > Ecco Pro was originally developed by Pete Polash, who had sold an early Macintosh based presentation program to Aldus and Bob Perez, a Harvard-trained lawyer hired by Apple as a programmer and Evangelist in the 1980s. It was first released in 1993 by Arabesque Software, Inc., based in Bellevue, Washington. PC Magazine awarded ECCO Pro their Editor's Choice award in 1996 and 1997. > Development by NetManage ceased in 1997 after the July 1997 release of version 4.01. Andrew Brown wrote in The Guardian: "So what happened to the paragon of a program? The market killed it. First it was sold to a much larger company, Netmanage; presumably doing this made the original programmers a lot of money. Then Netmanage pa
Read the rest
nicked when Microsoft Outlook came along as a "free" part of the Office suite, and killed development on the program." NetManage chief executive officer Zvi Alon noted that 'As soon as Microsoft decided to give away Outlook with Office, we started getting phone calls questioning the value of Ecco Pro'. Ecco was so beloved that it was binary patched to enable Lua scripting, a decade after being killed. It was virtually bug free and continues to work today on Windows, Linux+Wine and macOS+Crossover. It was so well designed that even though it predated the internet, it could be trivially extended to support hyperlinks. The main limitations after 20 years of zero maintenance are max db size and lack of scalable fonts. In 2023, an open-source PIM inspired by Ecco Pro reached v1.0 status after 14 years, built on Qt with binaries available for Win/Linux/Mac, https://github.com/rochus-keller/CrossLine CrossLine is an outliner with sophisticated cross-link capabilities in the tradition of the well-respected Ecco Pro. It implements the concept of "Transclusion" proposed by Ted Nelson and - among others - implemented in the legendary Objectory SE tool by Ivar Jacobson. It is also a full text database with built-in search engine.
In Agenda: a personal information manager (1990) [pdf]
Rochus·Jan 1, 2024
Well, no history of outliners can call itself complete without mentioning Ecco Pro (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecco_Pro), which from my humble point of view was "the mother of all modern outliners". Sure there were earlier ones like the mentioned More, but Ecco was a much more powerful tool. Unfortunately the development of Ecco was discontinued in the late nineties, but I used it for another ten years e.g. as an information management tool in some big government projects, but eventually I built my own tool, which inherited a lot from Ecco, but also added things I missed (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/CrossLine).
In A History of Outliners

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