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H-m-m: Hackers mind map

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Re: H-m-m: Hackers mind map

#91

Post by rcarmo »

sachin_m wrote: post #38
hinkley wrote: post #25

I showed up to a company wide strategy offsite with an iPad and whipped out a mind mapping tool. For the first ten minutes I could see my boss vibrating because he thought I was fucking around. By the end of the meeting he wanted a copy, and for me to CC his boss and a couple of his peers.

Which tool are you using on iPad?

Best ones I’ve used are MindNode and XMind. I actually used MindNode for personal stuff and XMind for work, but now I’ve been gravitating towards XMind alone because it also runs on Linux (besides Mac and Windows) and I can sync my mindmaps to the iPad with SyncThing.

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.

Re: H-m-m: Hackers mind map

#92

Post by ghaff »

iammjm wrote: post #89
wpietri wrote: post #28

I keep trying mind maps and getting frustrated because my mind works differently. Anybody know of ones that let you start out non-hierarchical? 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 strai…

Scapple is what you are looking for. Its from the same crew that made Scrivener. You can use it free for a month I think or pay like 20 bucks for a lifetime license. It lets you start anywhere and is very simple and intuitive. The only thing bad about it is exporting data out of it. https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scapple/overview

This is sort of the problem I have with most things that aren't just a text editor. They may be better in some ways (and I do like Scrivener) but at the end of the day, when I'm done, I want everything to be in a universal format on my own filesystem.

Re: H-m-m: Hackers mind map

#94

Post by rcarmo »

I went back and tried this and it is pretty awesome. Very, very good navigation and quick editing experience (and I use mindmaps a lot!)

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.

Re: H-m-m: Hackers mind map

#95

Post by phailhaus »

nadrad wrote: post #63
phailhaus wrote: post #29

Have you considered aligning sublists to the parent node? Right now, your eyes have to leap upwards from a node to get the first child of the list. And since each list has a different length, you have to scan upwards a different amount every time. If every list was aligned with the parent, you could just read left-to-right.

Would you mind explaining a little more?

In the screenshot in the repo, there's a node with the text "a mind mapping tool". It has 5 children, but the first child "text-based (terminal application)" is above it. So the more children a node has, the further above it the first child is. What if it was aligned so that the first child is at the same height as its parent? Then it might look more natural like a list, and read easier since the children start at the same height as the parent rather than at some arbitrary point above it.

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.

Re: H-m-m: Hackers mind map

#96

Post by nadrad »

trafnar wrote: post #86

I made a video overview of this tool if you want to see it in action. I also compared its philosophy to my tool TaskTXT ( http://www.tasktxt.com ). Hmm video overview: https://youtu.be/mRbaXHlhwUI

Thanks for the review! Try the focus feature (the 'f' key) and focus lock (shift+f) as well if you've not done so already; it can be very useful.

Re: H-m-m: Hackers mind map

#98

Post by homarp »

jjslocum3 wrote: post #45
wpietri wrote: post #28

I keep trying mind maps and getting frustrated because my mind works differently. Anybody know of ones that let you start out non-hierarchical? 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 strai…

The best tool I've ever used for this no longer exists, as far as I'm aware. It was circa 1991, a spectacular lightweight Macintosh application called "Inspiration." There currently exists software in the same lane with the same name - but if there's any blood relation between the two, the current bears little resemblance to its progenitor. I will mangle the terminology since it's been so long, but the basic idea was…

a review of Inspiration: https://archive.org/details/TNM_Inspiration_30_visual_thinki...

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

Re: H-m-m: Hackers mind map

#99

Post by kobalsky »

Minor49er wrote: post #9

This is really cool. Adding, editing, and navigating nodes is pretty intuitive (reminds me of working in a spreadsheet). I kind of wish that it would auto-center as you're editing, and it might be nice to be able to hit Escape to cancel out of creating a new node. The ability to export as HTML is simple and gives a nice result. I'm going to incorporate this into some of my workflows

> I kind of wish that it would auto-center as you're editing

press shift+c

Re: H-m-m: Hackers mind map

#100

Post by Cryptonic »

wpietri wrote: post #28

I keep trying mind maps and getting frustrated because my mind works differently. Anybody know of ones that let you start out non-hierarchical? 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 strai…

What I really like to prepared D&D games are Entity Relationship Diagrams. A very handy app for from the Android Play Store is "Draw Express Diagram Lite" - the touch UX to create diagrams is unmatched in usability if you ask me.
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