Hacker News Reader

Comment by est | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone explain to me why most mind map apps are of tree structures, but not graph structure?

In my personal process of thinking most ideas pop up as nodes then nodes are interconnected as a graph.

I tried to use one of these tree mindmap apps, some ideas morphs into another leaf on another subtree but I can not connect them visually, this irritates me a lot.

View on HN

An acyclic graph (or a tree structure) enables certain automatic layout algorithms. These algorithms are predictable by the user and are less distracting -- the key goal of any mindmap software is to not distract.

There's probably a semantic element of a hierarchy of ideas, too, but I am only equipped to comment on the math and not the psychology. :)

Yes a directed acyclic graph would help a lot.

But there isn't any mind map apps support that. (Not that I know of)

I now use yEd and OmniGraffle from time to time

I use OmniGraffle when a mac is handy; thanks for the reference to yEd, I hadn't seen that one before.

Good for yEd find.

So if we were going to take the LaTeX approach, we basically write our mind maps as .g files and then lay them out using Graphviz's dotty? That could actually work (OmniGraffle, BTW, uses Graphviz I think to layout DAGs).

If you're on a mac try "Scrapple". I had the same issue and Scrapple is incredible.

I think it's "Scapple". Thanks for the tip, it looks good!

Yep, Scrapple is a fairly gross pork product popular in Philly haha. Typo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com