How to insert code into a vimoutliner file?

Question

How to insert code into a vimoutliner document (.otl)? Is there something like:

<code>
...
</code>

Answer 1

You can insert a "preformatted body text" block by starting a line with ;, e.g.:

Hello world
    This is "Hello world" in Ruby
    ; def hello(name)
    ;   puts "Hello, #{name}!"
    ; end

According to the docs:

The preformatted text marker, ;, is used to mark text that should not be reformatted nor wrapped by VO or any post-processor. A post-processor would use a fixed-space font, like courier, to render these lines. A post-processor will probably not change the appearance of what you have written. This is useful for making text picture, program code or other format-dependent text.

You can also use < for a "user-defined preformatted text" block, which allows you to give a "style" to the block (e.g. to label which language it's in):

Hello world
    This is "Hello world" in Haskell
    <Haskell
    <hello :: String -> IO ()
    <hello name = putStrLn ("Hello " ++ name ++ "!")

As implied by the docs, what actually happens to those text blocks depends to what you're doing with your outlines once written - if you're using some tool to process them into another form, you'd want to check what that tool does with preformatted text blocks. I use a custom-written tool that takes the user-defined preformatted blocks and outputs syntax-highlighted HTML <code> tags.