Cascadelist

An outliner for everyone. One infinite list you can nest, fold, zoom and link.

Visit cascadelist.comSource on GitHub
The Cascadelist homepage: the headline 'Every thought gets a place to land' beside a small live outline
Role
Design and development
Platform
Web, works offline
Stack
TypeScript, TanStack Start, Postgres
Status
In development

Cascade is a fast, tree-based outliner for ideas, notes and structured work. Everything is a line, and lines nest inside lines as deep as you like.

The idea

Your novel, your sprint and your grocery run, all in the same tree, none of them in the way.

Most tools make you decide where a thought belongs before you can write it down. In Cascade you just type a line. Tab tucks it under the one above, and a click on its bullet zooms in so that line becomes its own page.

Folding hides what you don't need right now without losing it. Daily notes give every day a place to start, and the command palette jumps to anything from the keyboard.

A Cascade outline with three nested groups: a novel, a sprint with tasks, and groceries
A novel, a sprint and a grocery list in one outline, without an account.
The right-click menu on a line, with the Convert into submenu showing Text and Task
Right-click any line to convert, indent, zoom, duplicate or delete it.
The command palette searching for 'chapter', with two matching nodes and an option to create a new one
The command palette searches every node and jumps straight to it.
The 'Sprint 14' line zoomed in as its own page, showing its three tasks
Zoomed in, a line becomes its own page with its own URL.
Cascade onboarding, titled 'Everything is a line', listing the five gestures that drive the app
Onboarding explains the whole app in five lines.

How it's built

The browser comes first

The outline lives in IndexedDB, so every edit lands on your device before anything else and the app works fully offline. Without an account it never talks to a server.

Sync is optional

Sign in with Google and Cascade mirrors the outline to Postgres in the background. Local edits queue in an outbox and conflicts resolve last-write-wins per node, which keeps the model simple enough to trust.

Fast at any size

Large trees render through a virtualized list, so navigation stays responsive as a workspace grows, and every node keeps a stable URL you can link to.

One repository

The app and the marketing site are both TanStack Start apps in a pnpm monorepo. The site's pages are built from Payload CMS blocks, and authentication runs on better-auth.

The website

cascadelist.com opens with a real outline you can type into before reading a word of marketing. Below it, each planned view gets a small illustration built from the same parts as the app.

The features section of cascadelist.com: cards for Board, Table, Links and backlinks, Mirrors, Split pane and History, each marked coming soon
One outline, a dozen ways to look at it: the views on the roadmap.

Where it stands

  • Live today

    Nesting, folding, zooming, tasks, daily notes, search and offline-first sync.

  • On the way

    Backlinks, mirrors, board and table views, history, templates and import.

  • Open source

    Developed in the open on GitHub, with a self-hosted setup over Docker Compose.