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Comment by safog | Hacker News Reader

Pretty graphs, but I wonder how it stands up to the tests of the real world.

I've personally tried to use mind maps (a bit more general than solving technical problems) but gave up pretty quickly. I think part of the problem was the technology itself, mind map apps are mostly desktop only and the mobile experience navigating a 2D diagram is kind of clunky. The other part was just laziness, after building a mind map for an entire weekend I didn't even scratch the surface of what I wanted to achieve with it.

Also I take objection to the fact that we go straight to Google for solutions, I check the existing codebase I'm working on, code search in my company's internal repo, code search github, then go to Stackoverflow / docs. So there's some amount of intermediate caching.

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I moved from mind maps (I used and liked FreeMind) to indented outlines in plain text files when I realized I wasn't really losing anything to map the nodes to headings and the edges to sub-headings. I can capture the same relationships, keep it synced to everywhere via cloud storage, and I don't need special software beyond a text editor to look at or edit it.

Now I just need to learn how to go back through them.

One thing I do , which combines the two is create the lists in Obsidian, then use the mind map plugin to visualize them.

This is an interesting idea, but I couldn’t find Mind Map in the list of core plugins. Is this a community plug-in you’re talking about?

Yes, it's a community plugin: https://github.com/lynchjames/obsidian-mind-map

Mindnonde lets you build a mindmap and export as markdown so a reversal I guess

Writing as someone who uses mind maps as part of my kit, I empathize with your comment. For my purposes, I've found that it helps to focus the map around a specific objective, project, etc. If I'm preparing a paper or presentation, it's helpful to see how the content can be structured, what can be pruned and what relationships between concepts there are. For project work or other objectives, I find them to be helpful in tracking and guiding learning.

FWIW, I use iThoughts across a couple of different devices. It's been around for a while now and has a good mix of usability and functionality.

After a few goes at it, I've mostly settled into using mind maps as a brainstorming / thought organizing construct and I transcribe the useful results to plain text for longer term search and storage.

Mobile is a challenge for all these PKM systems, esp capture but also retrieval. Luckily most knowledge work is still done with a big screen.

The potential with mind maps seems so awesome. But, yeah, clunky implementations abound.

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