Following a short beta period, The Omni Group has officially launched OmniOutliner 6.
It features multiple powerful improvements and new features that will make any outlining task even more streamlined and helpful, even for the non-practicing outliners out there. Here are the highlights.
OmniOutliner 6 introduces Omni Links
As promised last November, OmniOutliner 6 is yet another Omni Group app to get the Liquid Glass visual overhaul, in addition to becoming a universal app.
From The Omni Group:
OmniOutliner has been visually refreshed, adopting beautiful Liquid Glass design elements and a modernized look and feel when run on macOS Tahoe 26, iOS 26, or iPadOS 26. With updated iconography throughout the application and a new app icon that adapts to clear and tinted on supported devices, OmniOutliner 6 feels right at home on the latest Apple operating systems.
The fact that OmniOutliner 6 is now a universal app means that users can now leverage all of its new features from their Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Apple Vision Pro, with a consistent UI and a universal feature set, including a versatile new addition called Omni Links.
With Omni Links, users can link to documents through user-defined Connected Folders. These can be either local, or remote through Dropbox, iCloud Drive, Google Drive, and Google Docs. It also works with files and folders located on a local server.
In addition to files and folders, the new Omni Links feature also works with web links, making it even more powerful, particularly when using multiple devices. Finally, it also works with specific content within a document. They are also shareable, as long as the other user is running OmniOutliner 6 too. It’s really cool stuff.
Refined UI, themes, and templates
OmniOutliner 6 fixes some of the Dark Mode quirks that users from previous versions tended to notice, which reinforces the notion that no stone was left unturned during the development process of the new version.
Users can now set the app to mirror the system setting for light or dark mode, and even create their own light or dark appearances, which is a nice touch.
That also brings me to Dynamic Themes, which adapts the app’s and even the templates’ color schemes to light or dark mode. This improves visibility in either setting, and is especially welcome for users who mirror the system’s automatic light/dark switching throughout the day.
OmniOutliner 6 also introduces fully customizable templates with cross-platform compatibility, reinforcing the app’s new universal approach.
It also brings over interface details that were previously device-specific, such as the ability to hide the bottom bar on the Mac, which was formerly exclusive to the iPad, and advanced document styling on the iPad and iPhone, rather than just on the Mac.
Finally, OmniOutliner 6 features significant usability improvements that bring more flexibility to each project, including notes spanning multiple columns, customizable horizontal and vertical grid lines, row indentation toggles, unlimited levels of outline hierarchy, and multiple window support for the same project.
One nice tidbit from the latter is that you can have two instances of the same project open on different windows, and drag items between them. This makes reordering and organizing items really easy (and it’s just kind of cool).
Now this is really fun. OmniFocus 4.8 introduced Apple Intelligence support, adding a welcome generative text aspect to the app.
Here’s what Omni Group CEO Ken Case said about it back when OmniFocus 4.8 was released:
“So, beginning with OmniFocus 4.8 on macOS Tahoe 26, iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and visionOS 26, Omni Automation introduces support for querying Apple’s on-device Foundation Model directly from within scripts and plug-ins. This means you can take advantage of AI without sharing your personal information or data with third-party AI services: all interaction is performed on your Apple device (computer, iPad, iPhone, or Apple Vision Pro).
(…)
Plug-in authors can integrate the language models with your OmniFocus data in all sorts of creative ways. For example, we’ve created a “Help Me Plan” sample plug-in, demonstrated in the video above, that breaks down the selected task into smaller tasks.
Whether or not to use these AI models is completely up to you. They’re not perfect oracles by any means. But sometimes even a bad suggestion can help you past a mental block in planning a project, so you can move forward again.”
OmniOutliner 6 builds on this with the launch of AI Tools, a highly customizable feature that leverages both Omni Automation plugins, as well as Apple’s on-device AI model.
Here’s Omni again:
For developers of Omni Automation plug-ins, the new “AI Tools” feature enables the Apple Foundation Models framework to execute custom code snippets or “AI Tools” that you create and add to your plug-in or library. Think of “AI Tools” as JavaScript functions within your code that can be called as needed by the Apple Foundation Models frameworks.
In practice, this means that users can extract text from emails, web pages, documents, and even segments of documents (remember Omni Links?), hand them over to Apple’s Foundation Models, and receive outline summaries in response to specific prompts, instructions, schemes, and more.
Users can even ask for fully detailed outlines from prompts such as “help me plan for a cross-country road trip during the spring,” complete with nested items, and the ability to easily hand the result off to OmniFocus and get cracking on the planning.
More welcome tidbits
OmniOutliner 6 also features:
- Attachment Enhancements — Image attachments can now be resized to better fit your content. Additionally, attachment support, previously a Pro-only feature, is now available in the Essentials edition of OmniOutliner.
- Saved Filters — Saved filters now support nested AND/OR/NOT rules, an expanded set of date-based rules, and rule comments.
- Paste — New “Pasting from other apps” setting offers options for pasting styled text. Dedicated menu items are now available for “Paste and Merge Styles,” “Paste and Match Style,” and “Paste with Original Style” behaviors.
- Essentials Mode — Pro customers who want to test the Essentials experience can now disable Pro features in the License window.
Since OmniOutliner 6 is now a universal app, that also means that it is a universal purchase. In other words, you can buy it once, and use it on macOS 15 Sequoia and later, iPadOS 26 and later, iOS 26 and later, and visionOS 26 and later.
9to5Mac’s take
I’ve never been much of an outliner. But I gave it a shot with OmniOutliner 6, and came away really impressed with how easy it was to actually incorporate outlining into some of my day-to-day tasks, including writing this very post.
Even more welcome was the fact that every single customization need or “I wonder if…” thought I had, OmniOutliner 6 actually supported exactly what I wanted to do. It felt like, regardless of how deep I dug, I was still scratching the surface. That’s how good software should work.
The LLM aspect is also surprisingly interesting and useful, since it adds a degree of unpredictability and non-determinism to outlines that can be particularly welcome in creative tasks. And given The Omni Group’s extensive experience with automation, OmniOutliner 6’s AI-powered capabilities are as near a perfect implementation as it gets.
If you’ve never tried outlining, OmniOutliner 6 (or possibly the Essentials edition of OmniOutliner) is a great way to start. Their documentation, guides, videos, and help articles make it really easy to dive in.
It is likely that even if outlining doesn’t stick to every aspect of your productivity workflow, you’ll still find yourself reaching for OmniOutliner more often than you expect.
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