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Show HN: Turn indented text into mind maps

tobloef.com

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Re: Show HN: Turn indented text into mind maps

#62

Post by elcapitan »

The idea is great, but the nodes constantly rearranging and floating around (and overlapping) makes the actual "mind mapping" hard to do, at least for me. When I look at something like that, make a few changes on the left, I would expect the right side to stay relatively the same or at least change in a more predictable way.

Re: Show HN: Turn indented text into mind maps

#63

Post by TobLoef »

elcapitan wrote: post #62

The idea is great, but the nodes constantly rearranging and floating around (and overlapping) makes the actual "mind mapping" hard to do, at least for me. When I look at something like that, make a few changes on the left, I would expect the right side to stay relatively the same or at least change in a more predictable way.

I'll see what I can do to improve this. At the moment you can click "Lock all" under the "Mind Map" menu to lock all the nodes in place.

Re: Show HN: Turn indented text into mind maps

#64

Post by davidjhall »

TobLoef wrote: post #5
davidjhall wrote: post #3

My antivirus software blocked the site as malicious. I would think it's a false positive but the AV hasn't marked anything bad in the past year --- first time seeing the message. ( Also blocked the Markdown Editor)

That's weird. What antivirus do you use? And does it say anything about what caused the block?

bitdefender: an infected object has been detected on this page.

doesn't say which objext

Re: Show HN: Turn indented text into mind maps

#67

Post by mncharity »

I started something similar, but it's been gathering dust lately. FWIW, some differences were:

Graph instead of tree. I'm rather baffled by the popularity of mindmaps. Even on paper, I do cyclic graphs of typed nodes and links. So the end of text lines could optionally contain link targets, node types, and "use this link type for these children".

Outline mode for text. Mirrored in the graph.

3D graph. I'm mostly interested in using it in VR/AR.

Graph nodes with arbitrary markdown. So a node might be a markdown list. Dynamically managing outline-like "collapsed vs list vs graph vs graph-with-reduced-force" was a puzzle.

Instead of online editing, it was a development kludge of file watching and hot reload.

Motivating use case: Most project management is so constrained on time and resources, that that's what tools are build around. But I do a lot of opportunistic lazy projects (eg "when browser bug #N eventually get's fixed, we could do an exploratory spike over that way, or alternately, we could take this other path which is bottlenecked on X and Y and needs a risk mitigation exercise on Z"). Even a small project can have an order-1000 node graph. And I've never seen tooling that wasn't wretched at managing them.

Re: Show HN: Turn indented text into mind maps

#68

Post by mncharity »

elcapitan wrote: post #62

The idea is great, but the nodes constantly rearranging and floating around (and overlapping) makes the actual "mind mapping" hard to do, at least for me. When I look at something like that, make a few changes on the left, I would expect the right side to stay relatively the same or at least change in a more predictable way.

> the nodes constantly rearranging and floating around

Sigh. So there's like three decades of research on interactive graph layout stability. And almost none of it has become available as code. Much of graph layout is like that. Perhaps VR/AR will finally create sufficient incentive to make it more accessible.

Re: Show HN: Turn indented text into mind maps

#69

Post by ben174 »

collyw wrote: post #32

Ok, this confirms what I had though. Mind maps are just hierarchies with a different layout from normal.

Yea, presumably in the visual format you could connect to root nodes together. Or do weird ancestor joins which would be impossible to represent in this tabbed format. But I guess that might be breaking the "mind map rules".
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