Some outliners are designed so that every operation that occurs must be performed by the user. But others have a variety of automatic operations, the most common of which is word/phrase recognition for indexing, tagging, and some layout. An example of layout may be the automatic identification of an address and formatting the note as an address book entry. But there are cooler, fancier, and more useful actions that can be applied. And it is so much better if the actions are scriptable by the user. An example script: “Take all the notes having to do with things I said I would do, and make a clone and put under a header ‘Things-To-Do’ according to priority, and when one of those things to do was ‘finish this note,’ color those headers red and place all contributing notes as children.”

Of outliners, Tinderbox has the strongest capabilities of this type. Radio is in a sense scriptable as well but lacks the triggers of Tinderbox, as the filtering is presumed to be done at a server by Frontier. Leo has an interesting scripting language that is embedded in notes. IdeaKnot is the most peculiar: it is an outliner in the same odd sense that VooDooPad is, except a step more radical: its entries can also be scripts that (using a glossary-like rewriting) direct from one “knot” (collection of notes) to another in a dynamic hierarchy.