H-m-m: Hackers mind map

[wpietri]

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 straightforward that supports that approach?

[neovive]

I tend to work this way with a tool called Markmap (https://markmap.js.org/repl). I start with one heading and a list then begin moving items and adding new headings/subheadings as the relationships form. For example:

  // 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 6

[MacsHeadroom]

I'm the same as you. Obsidian[0] is non-linear and has worked for me.

0. https://obsidian.md/

[iammjm]

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

[jjslocum3]

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 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.

[puchatek]

I am currently trying a big sheet of white paper, folded once in the middle and a pilot frixion pen.

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)

[knlb2022]

I have 3 suggestions! because that's how I tend to work too

- 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.

[Cryptonic]

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.

[captaincaveman]

Yeah this is a common problem that pops up all the time, typically a tree, or taxonomy etc aren't sufficient and you need an ontology. But they aren't so easy to grasp intuitionally so we try to dumb it down and then hit problems, imho.

[nadrad]

Depending on the topic I'm working on, sometimes I need an approach similar to what you explained. I still use a mindmap, open a first-level node called 'temp' and start adding everything there and keep sorting them. As soon as a structure starts to emerge, I create other nodes and move those items to their new places. This is based on the assumption that your final output would be a tree with one-to-many relationships rather than a graph with many-to-many relationships. I've seen tools for organizing many-to-many relationships, but I never had the need to use one.

[trinsic2]

Im using iThoughts. It's Windows/Mac only though. I recently switched to Linux and trying to get it to work in Wine.

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.

[yencabulator]

The left-to-right trees of these mindmap applications has always felt a very bad fit for me. To me, a mindmap is a big piece of paper with the core concept in a bubble in the middle, and things drawn outward from it, with lines connecting things when they are related. The end result is much more organic, and spatial layout matters.

[edwinyzh]

FastMindMap (https://fastmindmap.innovationgear.com) allows adding on the board the so-called 'floating topics', and later you can build hierarchical or parallel relations between the topics with drag-and-drop. (I'm the developer).

[throwoutway]

Usually the non-hierarchical is an option to toggle on/off in the tools I’ve used.

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

[william-at-rain]

I’m a huge fan of Graphviz and git. Text is easily diffable!

Try SketchViz.com and see what you think.

Also a shoutout to yEd Graph Editor (free).

[collaborative]

The one I created supports force diagrams as well as hierarchies. You can add nodes and later rearrange them ("move")

Feel free to try. Works on all platforms, can be used as a collaboration tool, and has a ton of other features

https://6groups.com

[brightball]

The only time I ever use them is when I’m making notes about something and realize that there are a lot of cross references. Helps to see them.

Also 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.

[jehna1]

miro.com works great for this kind of thing.

Edit: Or if you want an open source alternative, check out ourboard.io

[tooltower]

In the past when I've used them, I usually started by listing all the nodes in a long list under a single root, not trying to organize them at all. I fought the urge to organize everything from the get go.

[michaelwww]

I want this too. I found some answers in HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32536780

[ColinWright]

I use zim-wiki with the graph plug-in, along with external scripts that edit the underlying pages to both add and remove links.

I've emailed and tweeted.

[cloverr20]

I have recently started using kinopio and did like it. It has been getting more and more features recently, you could give that a try.

[Terretta]

Perhaps iThoughtsX from https://www.toketaware.com/

[timeon]

MindNode is good for this. Unfortunately they went for subscription model.

[evadk8]

maybe treesheets?

[trafnar]

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

[nadrad]

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.

[bilekas]

Thanks for the video really clear, not sure why but my mind just couldn't figure out what this project was from the github.

[scastiel]

Wow, a single PHP file, I wasn’t expecting that ^^

Looks cool though, I’ll try it soon :)

[hinkley]

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.

[sachin_m]

Which tool are you using on iPad?

[rhn_mk1]

Why would a mind mapping tool cause such a reaction? Are diagrams considered not serious where you work? Was the tool heavily ornamental/stylized? Or was it seen as writing down things that are obvious?

[Minor49er]

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

[Terretta]

There are no stupid questions, except maybe this one:

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?

[rasengan0]

Literally, today, was thinking about leveraging $tree for mindmapping when this dropped: Poor mans mind mapping tool with just the terminal [1] having been inspired by h-m-m (hackers mind map) [2]

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

[bheadmaster]

A terminal-based mind mapping tool with Vim keybindings? Count me in!

The fact that the name immediately made me think "Hamlin-McGill-McGill" is only a bonus :)

[nyxtom]

Vim keyboard mapping in the terminal. This is a great project. Now I can finally replace some of my web-based mind map tools

[placebo]

I never really understood the advantage of a mind map tool over a good tree-oriented note taking/task organizing tool. In fact I prefer the use of screen real-estate in a simple tree than a mind-map. Is this just a matter of personal taste or is there some functionality/concept am I overlooking?

[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.

[nborwankar]

Dave Winer of RSS and blogging fame created Think Tank, a text mode outliner, back in the 80’s. Was a single binary for MSDOS. Haven’t seen an outliner that came close.

[s3r3nity]

I'm old enough to remember when pockets of the Freemind[1] community aspired for that application to reach something of this state. Sadly, development forked and work on the original project stalled pretty hard.

Great stuff - thanks for sharing!

[1]http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

[oehpr]

I love this. Honestly if this had the same tasking capabilities as minder https://github.com/phase1geo/Minder I might just make the jump to it. Using mind maps as a tasking app has worked out well for me.

This project looks very very hackable. Might do a pull request

[rcarmo]

Using Git-Flavored Markdown, you can have [x] as checkboxes...

[koheripbal]

Should integrate with orgmode headings.

...but mapping everything is just step one. Step two is getting a prioritized list of todos for the day.

[phailhaus]

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.

[gaetgu]

Awesome. I am using PHP for some college classes and I can certainly say that I would never want to use it for something like this, but the fact that someone did is pretty awesome. I will definitely be using (probably a fork that I rewrite in a language that I will be willing to maintain) a lot for sure. Awesome work!

[falkd]

Can anybody point to some resources that would help someone who's interested in trying to use mind mapping?

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.

[dkaigorodov]

Love the idea, love the UI. I see same UI approach can give life to quite many new tools.

I'll try it when they repair my Mac

[_steady]

Hey! love the thing. Quick suggestion to the README on the section "Relative navigating and moving" It looks like I have to press H <AND> <-, to move left - I am assuming that I can do either or, a la vim. A small copy edit would make that clearer. Kudos!