This page describes how to move topics around within your outline.
When you move a topic, you move its family along with it (its daughters, and their daughters, and so on). This is one of the basic principles of outlining.
NOTE: If it would be forbidden to create a topic in a certain position, then it is equally forbidden to move a topic into that position.
There are essentially three ways of moving topics:
Drag and drop. Click on a topic’s triangle, hold down the mouse button, and begin dragging. A small black bar will appear, indicating where the dragged material will go if you release the mouse. By moving the mouse up or down, left or right as you drag, you make the black bar appear just where you want it within the outline structure. When it is where you want it, release the mouse.
(If you hold the Option key during the drag and drop, the dragged material will be copied instead of being moved.)
In the following illustration, the first topic (“Easy cheesy spicy ramen”) has two daughters, “Instructions” (partly hidden by the drag cursor) and “Ingredients.” The topic “Ingredients,” along with its family, is being dragged upwards so as to precede “Instructions.”
(You can also drag and drop topics from one outline to another, or from an outline into another application. This is equivalent to copying and pasting. If you drag and drop topics into the Finder, you get a text clipping. For more information about drag and drop, read here.)
Menu items and keyboard shortcuts. Four menu item commands with keyboard shortcuts let you move the selected topic(s): Topic > Move Left, Topic > Move Right, Topic > Move Up, Topic > Move Down.
Move Up and Move Down move a topic among sisters. If a topic is a first sister, it cannot be moved up; if it is a last sister, it cannot be moved down.
Move Left moves a topic to become its mother’s next sister. If a topic is at top level, or in any situation where creation of an aunt is impossible, it cannot be moved left.
Move Right moves a topic to become its previous sister’s last daughter. If a topic has no previous sister, it cannot be moved right.
There is one big difference between moving topics by drag and drop and moving topics by these menu item commands: if there is a multiple selection, then moving by drag and drop gathers all the selected topics at the drop location, whereas the menu item commands will attempt to apply the command to each of the selected topics separately at its current location.
Cut and Paste. Select a topic or topics, and choose Edit > Cut. Now select a topic, and choose Edit > Paste; a pasted topic will be inserted as the next sister after the current topic. There is more information about cut and paste here.
You can also reorganize topics by sorting them.