Topics are the basis of everything, so the most basic thing to do in Opal is to create a topic. Every new document starts life with a single topic; but what then?
First, there are commands for creating a topic ex nihilo:
You can create (and start editing) a new topic as the current topic’s next sister. To do so:
Choose Topic > New Sister. The keyboard shortcut for Topic > New Sister depends upon your settings in Opal’s preferences:
If you have elected “Return key creates New Sister topic”, press Return.
(In this case, to enter a Return character within a topic so as to create a new paragraph, press Shift-Return.)
If you have elected “Return key creates new paragraph”, press Enter.
You can also create (and start editing) a topic as the current topic’s first daughter. To do so:
And you can create (and start editing) a topic as the current topic’s next aunt. To do so:
The menu commands mentioned above (Topic > New Sister, Edit > New Daughter, Topic > New Aunt) are available also through the contextual menu that appears when you Control-click on a topic’s triangle.
Note: How formatting is initially assigned to a topic created in these ways depends upon your Font setting in Opal’s preferences.
You can also create a topic by pasting (Edit > Paste Topic or Edit > Paste Text as Topics). The pasted topic(s) will usually become the next sister(s) of the current topic (under some circumstances they will become daughters of the current topic). Similarly, you can create a topic through drag and drop (possibly while holding down the Option key).
Finally, you can split a topic to create a new topic.
Certain types of topic creation will be disabled in special situations where such creation would be incoherent or would violate the hierarchical structure rules of the outline. So, for example:
If your outline is set to have a single ancestress, there can be only one top-level topic, so you cannot create a sister of the top-level topic.
In focused view, one topic has the focus, and it acts like a single ancestress within this view. So you cannot create a sister of the focused topic.
In filtered view, there is no outline hierarchy; the filtered topics are shown flat, without their hierarchical context. If you were to create a topic in this situation, Opal would have no way of knowing where in the hierarchy this topic is to go (because, temporarily, there is no hierarchy). Therefore, in filtered view, topic creation is disabled.