9 ms·
Show HN: Turn indented text into mind maps
- ksherlock 9y agoit's not an indented list in Safari or FireFox. https://imgur.com/a/AYtbv https://imgur.com/a/AYtbv
- TobLoef 9y agoA few months ago one of my favorite tools http://www.text2mindmap.com http://www.text2mindmap.com went down and since there doesn't seem to be any plans to bring it back up I created my own version of the site. It's basically just a quick mashup between some of the code from the original site and some code from my Markdown Editor (https://tobloef.com/markant/ https://tobloef.com/markant/), but I hope someone will find it as useful as I did.
- abrichr 9y agoCongratulations on shipping! It looks great. What do you normally use this sort of thing for?
- TobLoef 9y agoThanks. I use it as I would a normal mind map, to organize ideas and sometimes visualize trees of data. I just find the text-based approach to creating mind maps a lot faster and simpler than using the various other online tools, even though it's a bit more limited.
- pintxo 9y agoLike it, might use it as a online alternative to FreeMind, which allows pure keyboard control, so kind of similar, at least from my perspective.
- themarkn 9y agoI've used one in the past to organize my monthly routine. Seeing the "size" of my expectations for each week helps a lot. I used text2mindmap for this and a few other things. Didn't realize it was down, thanks for this!
- bryan11 9y agoThis looks great and very useful. Thank you!
- JepZ 9y agoAfter using it for half a minute I love it already!!! One thing I am missing thought is the ability to hide sub-nodes within the mind map. Thanks for sharing :-)
- cabaalis 9y agoDo you know why it went offline? I'll assume lack of funding. What would be the best way to make a niche-app like this self-funding, given developers' aversion to ads? Donations? Monthly/Annual subscription? I have a similar site that I want to spin up, that serves a different purpose but has a similar interface.
- mcjiggerlog 9y agoReally something like this shouldn't rely on being hosted by one person. A decentralized protocol like dat[0] would solve this problem. [0] - https://datproject.org/ https://datproject.org/
- cbenz 9y agoOr Secure-Scuttlebutt, which vehiculates the concept of identity as a first citizen. https://scuttlebutt.nz https://scuttlebutt.nz Here, the social aspects could be useful, like following my friends mind maps etc.
- dschep 9y agoAFICT this replacement is hosted on Github pages, so there shouldn't really be any funding concerns.
- kadrian 9y agoAmazing! Such an attention to detail! Love that it continues stabilizing while I'm dragging individual items. Thanks a lot for sharing this!
- davidjhall 9y agoMy 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)
- TobLoef 9y agoThat's weird. What antivirus do you use? And does it say anything about what caused the block?
- davidjhall 9y agobitdefender: an infected object has been detected on this page. doesn't say which objext
- Raphmedia 9y agoNo warning with Bitdefender.
- janneklouman 9y agoClean and intuitive UI, thank you for creating and sharing.
- m_ke 9y agoLooks awesome! We're in the process of building a knowledge graph and were looking for a more intuitive way to manage the main hierarchy. Adding node autocomplete would a great way to do that, especially if it could pull in existing children and dump them to text. What's the license?
- doughj3 9y agoCan you explain a bit more of your knowledge graph / hierarchy? I've been working on something like this myself.
- m_ke 9y agoWe're building a food/nutrition knowledge graph. Goal is to be able to take a product, recipe or restaurant dish that someone ate and determine what type of food it is, cuisine, ingredients, dietary properties and etc.
- spking 9y agoThis is very helpful. Just yesterday I was using mindnode and thinking it is overkill for 80% of my mindmapping tasks. Thank you.
- mistersquid 9y agoFantastic launch. It's intuitive, responsive, interactive, understandable, and cross-platform. Thank you. I'm a longtime user of a piece of Mac software called Tinderbox which I've used use to create mind-maps (linked knowledge trees) and Text2MindMap compares very favorably in that its directness and intuitive workflow allows for immediate and direct visualization. There's also something about the animation implemented here that for me seems to stimulate my thinking as I add nodes. Really good stuff here. Kudos to you for so polished a product. Good luck.
- stbn 9y agoThis looks very cool, thank you! I have an issue, though: Can't open the File and Mind Map menus, neither on Firefox nor Chromium nor Opera.
- rambojazz 9y agoI can't open them as well.
- TobLoef 9y agoWhoops, that should be fixed now, as soon as GitHub Pages updates.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cagrimmett 9y agoSame. Tried in Safari and Chrome. Upon inspection, looks like something is going wrong with the styles. Changing .dropdown-content{position:absolute;} to position:fixed; brought them back for me.
- hippich 9y agoLooks neat! Tried 1+ top level nodes and it automatically marked them as a child of first one. Not sure if this is broken or is a feature tho, just wanted to comment.
- rambojazz 9y agoLicense?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rambojazz 9y agoLooks like this could be useful for rdf/linked-data. Maybe for json-ld too.
- mrleiter 9y agoReally cool tool, thanks! Maybe you could add bold text as well? Just a thought!
- pmags 9y agoVery nice. But are the "File" and "MindMap" menu items supposed to do something? (like export the file). On both Safari and Chrome they don't seem to have any behavior.
- TobLoef 9y agoYeah sorry about that, it's fixed now.
- ksvarma 9y agoSimply Great, super neat. Especially that drag around on the nodes. Thank you for sharing.
- monk_e_boy 9y agoNice. Could you add google login so my students could save their work?
- nicpottier 9y agoCTRL-N is apparently a shortcut for new? Nice thought but this runs into standard navigation supported in OS X and most Unixes of using CTRL-N to go down a line. Kind of hard wired for me to navigate text boxes using CTRL-N and CTRL-P so would recommend another shortcut. Otherwise very neat!
- jbreiding 9y agoXmind has the outline editing mode that I find very useful for this very reason. Sure it's not just a simple text file but it also doesn't require edit and presentation on different places/apps.
- douglaswlance 9y agoVery cool. Might be nice to have standard positions so things are organized by default and don't require additional clicks.
- tonetheman 9y agoThis is great stuff! You should look into integrations with dynalist or workflowy. Also being able to read an OPML file would be a wonderful add too. Good work.
- collyw 9y agoOk, this confirms what I had though. Mind maps are just hierarchies with a different layout from normal.
- ben174 9y agoYea, 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".
- subpixel 9y agoAct fast and add a signup field so you can get the emails of people like me who want to know when you start a hosted service.
- TobLoef 9y agoGood idea. I added a link to a mailing list, which'll do the job until I make something better.
- hsitz 9y agoIt doesn't seem to work at all for me. Not sure why, I've checked with Chrome and Firefox on Linux (using i3 tiling window manager). I see the text outline on the left and the white pane on the right, where I assume I should see a mindmap. I see nothing but white in the large right pane, so maybe there's something you're supposed to do to get it to draw the mindmap, but I can't figure out what.
- TobLoef 9y agoThere was a bug with the styling, that should be fixed now.
- hsitz 9y agoNope, still the same, can't see any mindmap or any button to click to create one. However, I can now see some blue text up above and to the right of the menu items, which when clicked takes me to mailchimp for email. That text is unreadable for me, though, not enough contrast with the black background it's on. I don't know what I'm supposed to see, but I assume there's supposed to be a mindmap graphic somewhere. This is what I see on both Firefox and Chrome on my system: https://screenshots.firefox.com/REX701nPf7jUrYbw/tobloef.com https://screenshots.firefox.com/REX701nPf7jUrYbw/tobloef.com
- Multicomp 9y agoI love this, very simple yet power. Bookmarked for future use. Any chance of an offline version?
- keithpeter 9y agoAdd svg/pdf export and a map that grows without cropping and that would be ace
- UniZero 9y agoYou can grab it from the official Github page: https://github.com/TobLoef/text2mindmap https://github.com/TobLoef/text2mindmap Works perfectly offline. No server necessary :)
- smrtinsert 9y agoI was going to make something like this, but I wanted it across all devices, synced to google docs based on yaml. Is there such a thing already? The use case is really just textual entry on pcs and consumption/light editing on mobile.
- voldemort1968 9y agoThis is really fantastic. Such a simple concept that works so well.
- cryptoz 9y agoSuper neat. Quick bug report. I started typing as soon as I could. I jotted some notes down and indented with spacebar. After I had 5-6 lines written I noticed that the webapp completely deleted everything I had written and replaced it with something else. I guess the page hadn't fully loaded yet or something. But I would recommend hiding the text view or something until it is ready, so you do not accidentally delete user data. Otherwise super neat!
- akeck 9y agoAwesome! Can you add a license to the Git Repo? Thanks!
- dcchambers 9y agoThis is really slick. I never knew about (the now defunct) text2mindmap.com, but it seems like something I would get a lot of use out of for doing quick brainstorming sessions. Thanks for sharing!
- peterwwillis 9y agoIs there any way to get this to save as a DOT[1] file? I find it less than simple to get my graphs to show up the way I want them placed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT_(graph_description_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT_(graph_description_languag...
- binarytide 9y agobitdefender just freaked out on visiting this page. just a heads up
- chx 9y agoFabulous.
- drailing 9y agoHi, just a few days ago, I had the same problem and no text2mindmap. :( So I started a similar project but with a different approach: I use a local webserver (written in go, because everything written in go is automatically awesome, obviously) with a filewatcher and a simple websocket to send everything to the browser. And I use 2 spaces... https://github.com/cdreier/mind-surf https://github.com/cdreier/mind-surf
- drailing 9y agoAh damn, can't edit a comment? Wanted to ask if you are interested in merging some ui? Your output looks much better ;)
- diyseguy 9y agoIsn't fully working for me. Windows/Firefox. I can't drag the boxes around or activate the menu drop downs.. sigh. Looks cool though
- elcapitan 9y agoThe 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.
- TobLoef 9y agoI'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.
- mncharity 9y ago> 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.
- disconcision 9y agoAny suggestions on where in the literature to get started if I wanted to play around with different graph layout algorithms?
- Kinrany 9y agoI'm also interested, writing my own graph editor as a side project.
- mncharity 9y agoLet's see, a few very quick and crufty random thoughts... There are a great many open source graph programs available to be played with - which might contribute inspiration. And "sometimes much more easy to get working" images and videos of them. For surfing literature, I mostly use google scholar and scihub. Blog posts seem part of how the software dev community is educating itself and advancing, so perhaps do a post at some point. Perhaps approach the project like "writing a renderer" - something useful for learning computer graphics, without the expectation that it will escape the zombie fate of most graph libraries. Writing and posting a d3 example isn't hard, and might inspire others. ... Good luck.
- dtx1 9y agoNeato!
- kloud 9y agoFor those who use Markdown and Atom this plugin might also be of interest: https://atom.io/packages/markdown-mindmap https://atom.io/packages/markdown-mindmap
- oddsockmachine 9y agoExactly what I needed, thank you!
- mncharity 9y agoI 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.
- jcora 9y agoHey this sounds very interesting! Is it open source / where can I read more?
- mncharity 9y ago> Is it open source / where can I read more? It's just toy fragments at present. Using an idiosyncratic format. And a Windows MR HMD (for resolution), on linux(!), with three.js-but-not-WebVR (for resolution), and React, and emacs ... so in its current form, market size seems order-1. Low order one, since even I don't use it. One might pull together something simpler for people to play with. Maybe preprocessed yaml. Just a browser window. Simple three.js. ... But I haven't. What aspects of it sounded interesting? I'd been thinking of it as a niche itch-scratch type project.
- btbuildem 9y agoOP: https://gingkoapp.com/ https://gingkoapp.com/ will blow your mind
- TobLoef 9y agoThis looks great, I'm really looking forward to giving it a try. I've been using Trello to accomplish the same thing for a while, but it hasn't been ideal. Thank you for posting that.
- gitgud 9y agoCool! This kind of looks like a super charged version of: https://workflowy.com/ https://workflowy.com/
- dorgo 9y agoLanding page says nothing about what (and how) it actually does. I had to watch the youtube video to get a vague idea of what is going on.
- Kinrany 9y agoI would have closed the website after failing to find a description if not for the warning. But the videos are very short and clear, and it'd probably be harder to explain the interface with text.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- slx26 9y agonice work! doing quick graphs is very easy when you use paper and pen, but it's always been a pain to do with a computer! I assume this tries to be simple enough, but maybe it would be nice if we could have some extra, quick formatting, like dashes, like in lists (-) to stack elements, or other symbols for different layouts, quick access to colors, etc. I know handling multiple layouts and auto-placement with springs simulation can be tricky, but hey... in any case, thanks again for the work, hopefully it inspires more people to work along these lines!
- erandror 9y agoHey guys, That's basically what I'm doing with my new Mindmapping tool in dev, Wigwam. I'm pre-launch, but you guys are welcome to check it out. https://www.wigwams.io https://www.wigwams.io Let me know what you think!
- mrfusi0n 9y agoLooks great!
- TobLoef 9y agoLooks pretty good, I'm looking forward to trying it out. The UI a bit more cluttered than I would like, but it's nice to see something like this more fleshed out than what I posted.
- stewskro 9y agoWow- great job. I could think of literally hundreds of ways to use this!
- almostthere9999 9y agoFreeplane does this and many other cool things natively. Freeplane: Gpl, multiplatform, icons, styles, images, links, connectors, foldable, clone-nodes, scriptable (groovy, jruby, jython, javascript), efficient even with huge maps Just have a look
- nexus2045 9y agoThis is really good because of the attention paid to the ease and ergonomic physics of dragging the nodes. Keep up the good work.
- lexsys 9y agoI like the idea of transforming the text into visual representation. This project takes structure defined with tabs and builds beautiful maps. What if apply to static code analysis to produce dependency maps for the program? Or draw the type structure with their usage across the code?
- cdeshpande 9y agoI cant seem to access it, is it down?
- omegote 9y agoFor a less "floaty" style, this is a project I build some time ago, I think I already posted it here: https://josetomastocino.github.io/mindmapit/ https://josetomastocino.github.io/mindmapit/
- tejtm 9y agoFailing my least astonishment Distinct top level entities do have edges (no distinct roots). Identically labeled leafs are not merged (have multiple parent nodes)
- Heshl 9y agoHi Tobias, Very elegant! Thank you for sharing it. I was wondering if you could share a non-minified version of mindmap.min.js?
- camhart 9y agothis is great
- asjdfkjasd 9y agoThis seems to be a tree. How does one make a "graph" out of it. I want to link a single node to multiple other nodes without that node being parent. For example. Trump <-> Hillary Trump <-> Ivanka Hillary <-> Chelsea Ivanka <-> Chelsea Needless to say brilliant work
- ajaxguy 9y agoSimple and cool!. A bit of curious - I see your blog is hosted on github. Is this app also hosted in github? How is that achieved?