The outliner, reimagined.

The Original GrandView

In 1983, Dave Winer founded Living Videotext and created ThinkTank — one of the first commercial outliners ever made. After Symantec acquired Living Videotext in 1987, they released GrandView, a DOS-based outliner that BYTE magazine called "more than an outliner."

The original GrandView (1990) was the definitive version. It pioneered features that modern tools are only now rediscovering:

• Multi-dimensional outlining — combine a traditional outline with columnar metadata (categories, dates). View the same data from multiple angles.
• Item clones — the same item appearing under multiple parents, decades before Roam Research popularized "block references."
• Inter-document links — hot links between outlines, navigable with a keystroke.
• Hoist and gather — focus on a subtree (hoist) or filter marked items (gather) to see exactly what matters.
• Keyboard-first — every action accessible without touching the mouse.

GrandView was discontinued in the early 1990s with no successor. Its users never forgot it.

Built From the Ground Up

This GrandView is a ground-up reimagining for the modern web. Built with SvelteKit and designed for keyboards, it faithfully adapts the original's core concepts while adding capabilities that weren't possible on DOS:

• Entity graph backend — nodes are shared entities, not just text strings. One "Barnabas" across all your outlines, not N copies.
• Four views — Outline, Document, Category, and Gathered views let you see the same data from different perspectives.
• Rich date support — BCE/CE dates, approximate dates, ranges, qualifiers, natural language input in English and Spanish.
• Multi-document with links — create, link, extract, and inline outlines. Your document index is itself a GrandView outline.
• Clone-aware editing — when you edit a cloned item, choose to update everywhere or just this instance.
• Works offline — a PWA that stores your outlines in your browser. Your data stays with you.

The Heritage

Why "GrandView"?

You might be wondering: how can a new project use the GrandView name?

Symantec's original trademark for GrandView was registered in 1989 and cancelled in 1995 when they chose not to renew it. The software had no commercial presence for over 30 years — no website, no downloads, no active development. The name was abandoned along with the product.

We chose this name deliberately, not to trade on someone else's reputation, but to carry the torch. The original GrandView represented a high-water mark in outliner design that has never been matched. Its ideas deserve to live on, and its name deserves to be associated with software that honors those ideas — not to fade into obscurity.

We are actively pursuing a trademark registration for GrandView in the context of modern web-based outliner software. This project is built from scratch with original code — it shares a philosophy with the original, not a codebase.