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Emacs comes with a handy mode for writing and editing structured text. You type things like this:

* Big Idea 1
Maybe we should sell fish over the internet, because who wouldn't want to cut out the middleman when ordering Chilean Seabass?
* Big Idea 2
Let's hire hundreds of people to go around town writing about things that happen, then put their writings into a two-pound stack of papers we can sell for $1.
** Pros
*** Sounds kinda useful
*** Can advertise for things like clothing and soda
** Cons
*** High capital expenditure
It is a lot of work to produce hundreds of articles a day, print them in the early morning, and deliver them to thousands of readers.
*** How would writing for an average/objective/idealized "citizen" make sense?
Would we be wasting a lot of people's time?

Outline-mode interprets the asterisks as heading indicators, and automatically colorizes them. And then you just hit C-c C-t and get a headings-only view:

* Big Idea 1…
* Big Idea 2…
** Pros
*** Sounds kinda useful
*** Can advertise for things like clothing and soda
** Cons
*** High capital expenditure…
*** How would writing for an average/objective/idealized "citizen" make sense?…

Of course, there are also shortcuts for jumping between headings, expanding and collapsing individual subtrees, and more. Best of all, outline-mode is packaged with GNU Emacs and works as a minor mode with other modes, so you can use it to navigate HTML documents or source code too.

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