Arrange Ideas in Stacks

How to outline an argument in Napkin?

David avatar
Written by David
Updated over a week ago

The swarm interface is built for inspired browsing and serendipity. To form an argument, outline an article, or draft a Twitter thread, it is valuable to get the thoughts into a linear order again.

That's what Stacks are for. Stacks are little collections of thoughts. Move the cursor to the right side of the screen to show them. You can open as many Stacks as you like and archive them if you don't need them anymore.

Whenever an interesting thought combination arises, drag and drop them into a “stack.” Stacks are collections of thoughts you create, aiming at a particular output, e.g., the next blog post, newsletter, or Twitter thread.

You can rearrange thoughts via drag and drop within a stack, create sections, and add ideas. Once you feel it’s time to go from outline to writing, copy the entire stack to the writing tool of your choice by clicking the copy button on the top line of your stack. The whole stack content gets copied to your clipboard, and you can paste it afterwards to the writing tool of your choice.

Preferences vary largely here, from MS Word to Ulysses to Typeshare. Therefore we went for a simple and universal solution compatible with all tools already loved by writers. You can simply paste your Stack's content from your clipboard.

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