I've wanted to do something very much like this (vimflowy) in native vim for a while, but as a relative vim-noob I haven't found a way to do any of the following without going down the vim-plugins route:

- Instantly collapsable/expandable lists (I guess maybe vim folds by indentation could be used?)

- Open sub-list in new window

- Mark a "task" as done

- Basic text formatting (italics/strikethrough/monospace)

- Easy way to "search everything, show a list of results, jump to the context of the chosen result".

In contrast, vimflowy makes all of these quite easy and intuitive.

> - Instantly collapsable/expandable lists (I guess maybe vim folds by indentation could be used?)

Yes, `set foldmethod=indent`

> - Open sub-list in new window

This is something I'm not sure exists as a ready-made solution, you'll have to write a function for that. It's trivial for the majority of cases though.

> - Mark a "task" as done

> - Basic text formatting (italics/strikethrough/monospace)

I use vimwiki that has this, there are a lot of other ways to achieve the same.

> - Easy way to "search everything, show a list of results, jump to the context of the chosen result"

fzf.vim. The above and also supports fuzzy search.

>> - Open sub-list in new window

> This is something I'm not sure exists as a ready-made solution, you'll have to write a function for that. It's trivial for the majority of cases though.

gf (or <Ctrl+W>f for the new window version) could be useful for this, if the sublists are separate files: https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Open_file_under_cursor

I've tried `set foldmethod=indent`, but I've found it to be very slow and it introduces a noticeable lag when typing.

I've been using The Vim Outliner (TVO) for years now, haven't found anything else that works as well for my daily workflow.

https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=517

This comment strongly reminds me of the now-legendary Dropbox one[1]

For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

This comment is also legendary misunderstood. He pointed out how trivial the idea was, which of course became a problem for dropbox when every tech company implemented it once they saw the demand for it and took its marketshare. Nowadays it's hard to consider dropbox as anything but a dying product of a dying company.

Taking hierarchical notes in vim conflates content with presentation/representation, which is bad.

You can fold but how would you zoom?