Adding to this old thing: The zooming is probably one of the more unique features of outliner apps, but I don't think it's that central to the outliner notetaking experience. There's other things: Markdown is hostile towards indentation that's not part of a bulleted/numbered list - four spaces is treated as a code block which is absolutely awful for indenting workflows. Markdown is by design hostile towards line breaks The chief thing about an outliner is that the main structuring principle of a document are blocks and the indentation tree. All other formatting, even if functional (eg. headings for live outlines etc.) is secondary. Markdown is the opposite: Headings+whitespace is primary, and indentation trees are reserved as one contained, special element of the document. Workflowy-esque outliners show a clear bulleted list, but eg. OneNote note containers are just an indentation tree of paragraphs - they have bulleted lists but those are entirely decorative. You can fold entire tables or embedded videos inside empty lines if you want to. So the most basic outliner functionality would just be privileging tabbed blocks of text or other elements, and enabling folding and shuffling those blocks around with keyboard commands / drag and drop. Zoom is fancy, but actually very far down the list of making a proper outliner experience