mind mapping has been useful to me for years now but i've been displeased with all the virtual tooling for it. i don't entirely mind doing them on pen and paper but routinely reach for them when at the computer and it feels like a phantom limb to not have software for it.

i don't like how tablet/mouse oriented what i've found is...or how expensive. i also prefer text mode stuff in general bc i can focus on it better.

but i have mostly been unable to imagine a good interface design for text mode mind mapping.

what about a modal approach with a tiny command line?

the verbs in mind mapping are:

• new node
• find node
• new edge
• edit node
• pan around

from normal mode:

• i to create top level note in the current field
• / to search for a node in current field
  • select from fzf style list
• ? to search for nodes in all fields
• hjkl to pan around
• HJKL to big pan around
• c to connect to existing node (fzf search again)
• + to zoom in, bigger boxes + less truncation
• - to zoom out. zooming out is smaller boxes + truncated text
• N to create a new field
• pgdn to cycle fields L->R
• pgup to cycle fields R->L

from focused node mode:

• escape to go to normal mode
• i to create new node edged from this node
• e to edit node (subwindow with $EDITOR embedded)
• m to maximize node contents
• hjkl to navigate the edges
• enter to activate highlighted edge and go to connected node

the big open question to me is placement. i want to auto suggest a place for new nodes (top level or not) but then leter user move around. i think it's best to just allow overlapping? i could program finding a place but it seems like too much effort.

as for storage, i think anything short of sqlite would lead to a lot more complexity and work.

future directions:

• extracting hierchical lists from a root node
• convert to set of markdown file
• auto sorting of nodes to fill space