Everything in One Outline

Kosshi has no concept of notes or documents as separate units. No folders either. Everything exists as rows in a single outline, and you zoom into the part you need.

This article explains why we chose this design.

The cost of creating and sorting notes

In most note apps, there are steps before you start writing. Create a new note, give it a title, choose a folder if there is one. After writing, you'll need to find the right note the next time you open the app.

As notes accumulate, finding the right one becomes work in itself. There's also the issue of information that spans multiple contexts. Meeting notes with Company A — do they belong in the "Company A" folder or the "Project X" folder? Hierarchical classification has a structural limit: an item can belong to more than one category, but a folder can only hold it in one place.

Search helps here — with keywords, you can find things regardless of how they were classified. Workspace tools like Notion and Confluence work well with a pages-plus-search model.

Search, however, doesn't reduce the steps of creating, naming, and sorting notes. The real cost is not "can you find them" but "how many steps before you start writing."

Tools that removed these steps

Several tools have removed the sequence of "create, name, classify."

Since the early 2010s, WorkFlowy has used a design where everything goes into a single outline. No note units, no folders. Zoom into any node to display it as the root. For a field where separate documents had been the norm, this was a significant shift.

Cosense (formerly Scrapbox) has no folders. All pages are flat, connected through links. Relationships between pages form naturally through those connections.

Bear replaces folders with tags. A single note can carry multiple tags, making it accessible from any context.

The approaches differ, but they share the goal of reducing steps before writing. Kosshi takes the same approach as WorkFlowy: everything in one outline.

Living in one outline

When everything goes into a single outline, the way you work differs from the create-and-classify model in several ways.

There is no note to open first — the app resumes where you left off. When you want to write something down, you add a row and place it near a related topic.

When the effort of writing something down drops, the bar for what's worth capturing changes too. You end up writing down thoughts that wouldn't have merited their own note — half-formed ideas, passing observations. The more you write down, the more material you have to think with.

Unlike folders, which need upfront design, an outline's structure develops as you use it.

Project notes and grocery lists coexist in the same tree. Zooming in displays only that part, so they don't interfere with each other. Split into separate windows, and you can view different parts side by side.

Tags let you access information regardless of where it sits in the tree. An item has one position in the tree, but it can carry as many tags as needed, making it reachable from any context. Together with search and bookmarks, there are multiple ways to reach the same information.