outli VS zettel2

I had the same experience as you, and wanted nice automated headings, so I wrote outli. It's mostly a thin wrapper around outline-minor-mode, and is much simpler that outshine, dropping many vestigial features, and adding org quick-keys at heading positions.

I actually use my simple outli package for this, with folding, narrowing to sub-tree and org-style quick-key navigation. It does help a lot with a single large file.

It may also be worth taking a look at outli which provides org-mode-like navigation and structure editing via your comments.

I actually wrote a substitute for a pretty large and largely unmaintained package (outshine) called outli; it relies heavily on outline-mode and not much else.

This is what outline-mode is designed for. If you always want the same style of heading in various modes, and you want your headlines to have depth for hierarchical folding (e.g. // top level, /// next lower level, etc.), you might check out my little mode outli.

outli is a simple outliner mode which makes it easy to outline, fold, navigate, and restructure your code, documents, or other buffers. It offers nice headline styling, org-like speed-keys, imenu support, and more.

org-roam / denote -> my own stripped down clone

https://github.com/vifon/zettel2 (please disregard the unfortunate name)