YHK - yet another hacker news clone

If you are happy with the ribbon UI, then you are fine.

Personally, I can't stand it. So I use either Word 97, which has everything I need and a nicely minimal UI, and uses the same file formats as Office into the 21st century, or Word 2003.

Example (old) screenshot:

https://imgur.com/gallery/word-97-word-2003-under-wine-on-ub...

Note that in 97 I've turned off everything. No ribbon, no ruler, no toolbars, just menus and scroll bars, and I normally turn off the horizontal scrollbar too.

In Word 2003 I've left some of the clutter turned on so you can see the difference: the ruler and one toolbar.

Word 97 can't handle big portrait screens, for instance.

I broke down and bought Bike. I use it almost exclusively for drafting complex legal briefs: I like that it makes it easy to make any node at any level a heading. Its system of changing the format of nodes (to heading, body text, checkbox, unordered or ordered list, etc.) is fast, easy, and unique in the space. But printing leaves much to be desired.

Otherwise I end up using OmniOutliner. The filtering can be useful (and it's a feature not really available elsewhere) but often OmniOutliner can feel slow and overly feature-heavy. Printing is also not great.

I am not a big fan of web apps, but this looks like it fits the org-mode use pattern of to-do lists and so on.

But there's no integration with formatting, stylesheets, or anything, right?

In 2017 or so I wrote the maintenance manual for an earlier version of this educational 3D printer:

https://www.ysoft.com/be3d

It was about 350 pages with lots of illustrations and diagrams.

The entire manual was a single giant Word outline. That meant all the headings, subheadings, sub-sub-headings etc. were automatically formatted for me, plus automatic generation of table of contents and index, all automatically linked to the structure of the steps in each chapter.

The first edition took me about 6-8 weeks, the second edition under a month.

Later on I spent 4 years working with DocBook XML and a professional documentation production system -- but I can state from personal experience that for a solo project, me and 1 engineer, Word in Outline Mode was vastly more productive and efficient.

To the client's amazement, the final stage of print-ready layout took part of one morning at the end. I took one of their leaflets, laid out in Word, removed all the text leaving only styles, and then merged that stylesheet with the manual.

Bingo, fully-formatted document, in corporate colours and fonts, with headers and footers and so on. Just a little layout tweaking, adding some page breaks and things.

The ability to collapse all the levels down to just headings is an amazing navigation tool: it's like zooming out to an overview, then zooming back in somewhere else, while the text remains readable throughout.

Question was about old or outdated, total commander is old ;)

Don’t get me wrong, I love it! and I don’t think there is anything close to it.

Unfortunately, I have a Windows 8.1 PC and I downloaded the update for it from the official website, but unfortunately the installation LibreOfice failed , so I stayed with OpenOffice.

I stopped maintaining it because it required a stupendous amount of time. That's fine except I had mostly stopped using it myself for the last 2 or 3 years I was maintaining it and I wanted the freedom to use that time to explore other unrelated projects.

Simultaneously the visibility around that project got me hired more than once, but my interest in doing JavaScript for employment was fading as well. I still write JavaScript/TypeScript in personal projects to this day, but I do completely unrelated work now for employment.