H-m-m: Hackers mind map
github.com
github.com
For me, key nodes are often obvious long before relationships are. E.g., if I'm working with post-it notes, I might write a bunch of notes, cluster them, winnow, and only then want to start locking in relationships between items. Has anybody seen something that's pretty straightforward that supports that approach?
With hierarchy you can still achieve it though. If the topic is “alphabet” I might create major nodes A B C D without linking them. I then play with A B C and D and add more nodes in a brain dump and then re-arrange later and map the relationships
Edit: Or if you want an open source alternative, check out ourboard.io
I will mangle the terminology since it's been so long, but the basic idea was that on an infinite canvas you would create nodes representing concepts; these nodes were just UI "bubble" objects, like the ovals you might find in slide deck software. Relationships could be added after the fact by linking these nodes, and there was a fast way to create linked "sub-nodes" from an existing node. Also, very strong UI for arranging the node diagram.
Maybe the big problem with mind mapping tools these days is feature creep. A complex UI with too many options will absolutely get in the way of the thought process it serves.
Inspiration : the thought processor Authors: Donald Helfgott, Mona Helfgott, made by Ceres Software, Inc
History of the company: https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Inspiration_Software
This is mostly for home stuff of which there is quite a bit for a home owner. It can just lie on since table or shelf and be updated easily. I put notes and todos together and the todos get a little check box in front of them. I'm in control of the hierarchy and it mostly mirrors the layout of the house. Doesn't get in the way for me.
I also want to extend it to other areas but for now I'm trying things out with the house domain.
Of course the downside is that i cannot easily edit it when I'm out and about and have some idea. And it's not really possible to have any automated reminders or integrations. (Not sure if there are open source alternatives to what rocketbook is offering; that might be a way to hook this into some digital setup)
Try SketchViz.com and see what you think.
Also a shoutout to yEd Graph Editor (free).
// Start with:
# Ideas
- Item 1
- Item 2
- Item 3
- Item 4
- Item 5
- Item 6
// Move to:
# Ideas
## Group 1
- Item 1
- Item 2
- Item 3
## Group 2
- Item 4
- Item 5
- Item 6Also I like to use them in new organizations to map out the people I meet to make sense of who knows what about a topic. Especially in big orgs.
Feel free to try. Works on all platforms, can be used as a collaboration tool, and has a ton of other features
- Scapple (mac/windows only) https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scapple/overview I love how minimal it is, but wish there was a linux/web version. I'll probably make my own some day.
- kinopio (web/mobile) kinopio.club Works well, but has a strong, quirky personality which sometimes gets annoying for me; I prefer the minimalism of scapple.
- draw.io / diagrams.net You can configure it to hide most of the toolbars and then just use it as mind mapping software, this is what I'm trying at the moment.
I do believe you can create nodes without any Hierarchy and you can always join the nodes into a hierarchy later.
It's got great export features and a ton of other stuff. For me it's the best mind mapping software I have ever seen and I have tried a lot of them.
I've emailed and tweeted.
Hmm video overview: https://youtu.be/mRbaXHlhwUI
Looks cool though, I’ll try it soon :)
By the end of the meeting he wanted a copy, and for me to CC his boss and a couple of his peers.
XMind does have a couple of irritating bugs on Fedora around keyboard input (I can’t move focus with the cursor keys, it creates a new node) but it might be specific to my setup. Their support/developers don’t seem to care much, though.
press shift+c
Q. Why is a wide horizontal tree superior way to work with a mind map that’s a pure outline (not a DAG) than a simple outline?
See the Data Format here, it’s an outline. Keystrokes are about moving nodes and descendants, that can work on an outline. And then why not have a portable outline format.
I do understand this is terminal/text. Yet there are plenty terminal/text outline editors, and being able to see a narrow outline instead of a wide tree feels more usuable.
That said, I use and really enjoy iThoughtsX which can import/export OPML and Markdown etc., and provides ability to control visual layout per ‘information geography’ or ‘cartography’. So not averse to visual graph depiction of a DAG, just asking why folks like this for pure outline format instead of outline editing?
Note that in the image there, they’ve got some subnodes expanded deep horizontally, while their sibling nodes might be even deeper but are collapsed.
The difference with a simple vertical outline is that this format is focused on pruning/unpruning parts of the tree, pair with an expectation of arbitrarily “deep” nesting. I find that in outline format, I’m unlikely to go deeper than a couple levels, and will at that point either switch to narrative or use some sort of referencing scheme.
As I help our firm select knowledge management tools, I'm just trying to understand the use cases that differentiate this approach from a fully fledged outliner.
Note that I ask the same thing of people who do outlines in MS Word manually as plain bullet lists instead of using, you know, the outliner. :-)
Went with VimOutliner [3] instead which is one less thing to install and fits so well with a tmux-vim setup.
Now all that is missing a sparse tree mode like OrgMode that beats out tabs and splits [4]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32846124; https://www.unixsheikh.com/tutorials/poor-mans-mind-mapping-...
[2] https://github.com/nadrad/h-m-m
[3] https://github.com/vimoutliner/vimoutliner
[4] https://orgmode.org/manual/Sparse-Trees.html#Sparse-Trees
The fact that the name immediately made me think "Hamlin-McGill-McGill" is only a bonus :)
I do wish it was in a compiled language like C or Go (or a more common CLI scripting language like Python) so I didn’t have to install PHP at all.
Great stuff - thanks for sharing!
This project looks very very hackable. Might do a pull request
Is your suggestion to simply name a node '[ ] thing to do'?
I could talk at length about the ergonomic deficiencies there but I wanted to verify first that I understood you correctly.
...but mapping everything is just step one. Step two is getting a prioritized list of todos for the day.
This would help with flow, because then you can read left to right and scan downwards. Right now you have to keep jumping up to find the first child and then scan down to read all the children.
Perhaps the hotkey of '0' could be used as it is next to O for creating a new "child list". Great tool as-is though.
I often see these mind map things and I'm interested in learning what benefits they can provide me, but I have no idea how they're actually used. My searches have only yielded people using them as study aids.
Essentially they are all about creating a breadth-first outlay, when there are lots of things to cover, think about, or discuss. Then you can tack your additional needs on around that.
Tony was also obsessed with learning, memory, and memorization as general aims in life, so he tried to map natural patterns like sensory factors, fractals, and meaningful branches onto his mind map scheme. In his view, this merge with the mystically-natural was in effect a merge with the best one could achieve in taking notes.
IMHO however, those are some of the least interesting parts in terms of day to day note taking utility, and the capture of a broad set of ideas as if it's all owned by one central topic is basically fantastic enough for most uses. This is also known as a concept map.
I'll try it when they repair my Mac
A question to others who enjoy similar tools:
What is the difference between this (or other) tool to a simple document on Gdocs with multilevel bullet lists?
The fact that it's terminal-centric is also situationally an advantage as opposed to gdocs, but that could easily be solved by vim or something, so I don't think that's quite what you were asking.
You can either run the code or develop on the code with no more "works on my machine" that way
Something like this should have done it:
FROM php:8
# install that mbstring library
CMD ["however", "you", "start", "php", "apps"]Oh well.
This isn't a real Buzan-style mindmap, though, because the words aren't on the lines.
get off my yard
- Why is this written in PHP? Who builds CLI applications in PHP? Everything looks like a nail, I guess? - Why did you choose your own custom serialization format instead of using something universally supported, like JSON? It's literally more effort for you and everyone else involved for zero benefit. - I love CLI applications and CLI navigation(vim-style, etc) but it really feels like a missed opportunity for this to not have any sort of web UI, since it would be very natural to click, zoom and pan around.
Programming is not my career, but rather a hobby, and I developed h-m-m because I wanted to have something like this and couldn't find one. Therefore, what I've done here may have a lot of room for improvement.
It makes sense to me that a hobbyist might well build a CLI in whatever is convenient for them, and not know to look for standard serialization formats.
I’m not fond of it being in PHP, either (mostly because I doubt I have it installed to use this), but that doesn’t make this a bad tool, just one that solves someone’s problem.