
Show HN: Turn indented text into mind maps - TobLoef
https://tobloef.com/text2mindmap/
======
TobLoef
A 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.

~~~
cabaalis
Do 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
Really 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
Or 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.

~~~
TrevorJ
>vehiculates the concept of identity as a first citizen.

What the heck does that even mean?

~~~
stephenr
It’s a perfectly cromulent sentence.

------
btbuildem
OP: [https://gingkoapp.com/](https://gingkoapp.com/) will blow your mind

~~~
dorgo
Landing 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
I 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.

------
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.

~~~
jcora
Hey this sounds very interesting! Is it open source / where can I read more?

~~~
mncharity
> 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.

------
hsitz
It 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
There was a bug with the styling, that should be fixed now.

~~~
hsitz
Nope, 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)

~~~
TobLoef
I think that might be a problem with the caching. I'll look into forcing a
cache refresh.

~~~
hsitz
Okay, seems to be working now. And mailchimp link is visible in 'subscribe to
newsletter' over by github and twitter icons.

------
erandror
Hey 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!

~~~
TobLoef
Looks 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.

------
kloud
For 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
Exactly what I needed, thank you!

------
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.

~~~
mncharity
> 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
Any suggestions on where in the literature to get started if I wanted to play
around with different graph layout algorithms?

~~~
Kinrany
I'm also interested, writing my own graph editor as a side project.

~~~
mncharity
Let'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.

------
subpixel
Act 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
Good idea. I added a link to a mailing list, which'll do the job until I make
something better.

------
ksherlock
it's not an indented list in Safari or FireFox.

[https://imgur.com/a/AYtbv](https://imgur.com/a/AYtbv)

------
almostthere9999
Freeplane 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

------
mistersquid
Fantastic 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.

------
cryptoz
Super 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!

------
hippich
Looks 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.

------
peterwwillis
Is 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_languag...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT_\(graph_description_language\))

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

~~~
ben174
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".

------
m_ke
Looks 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
Can you explain a bit more of your knowledge graph / hierarchy? I've been
working on something like this myself.

~~~
m_ke
We'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.

~~~
doughj3
Sounds really awesome - any mailing list or social media where I could follow
the project?

~~~
m_ke
We have a newsletter sign up form on bite.ai but haven't really emailed anyone
yet. The API is coming soon though so we'll probably send out a message when
we launch it.

------
drailing
Hi, 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
Ah damn, can't edit a comment?

Wanted to ask if you are interested in merging some ui? Your output looks much
better ;)

------
diyseguy
Isn't fully working for me. Windows/Firefox. I can't drag the boxes around or
activate the menu drop downs.. sigh. Looks cool though

------
lexsys
I 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?

------
nicpottier
CTRL-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!

------
Multicomp
I love this, very simple yet power. Bookmarked for future use. Any chance of
an offline version?

~~~
UniZero
You can grab it from the official Github page:

[https://github.com/TobLoef/text2mindmap](https://github.com/TobLoef/text2mindmap)

Works perfectly offline. No server necessary :)

------
omegote
For 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/)

------
davidjhall
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)

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

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

doesn't say which objext

------
smrtinsert
I 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.

------
jbreiding
Xmind 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.

------
slx26
nice 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!

------
dcchambers
This 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!

------
pmags
Very 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
Yeah sorry about that, it's fixed now.

------
asjdfkjasd
This 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

------
monk_e_boy
Nice. Could you add google login so my students could save their work?

------
voldemort1968
This is really fantastic. Such a simple concept that works so well.

------
akeck
Awesome! Can you add a license to the Git Repo? Thanks!

------
stbn
This 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.

~~~
cagrimmett
Same. 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.

------
spking
This is very helpful. Just yesterday I was using mindnode and thinking it is
overkill for 80% of my mindmapping tasks. Thank you.

------
rambojazz
License?

------
nexus2045
This is really good because of the attention paid to the ease and ergonomic
physics of dragging the nodes. Keep up the good work.

------
douglaswlance
Very cool. Might be nice to have standard positions so things are organized by
default and don't require additional clicks.

------
Heshl
Hi Tobias, Very elegant! Thank you for sharing it. I was wondering if you
could share a non-minified version of mindmap.min.js?

------
tejtm
Failing my least astonishment

Distinct top level entities do have edges (no distinct roots).

Identically labeled leafs are not merged (have multiple parent nodes)

------
ajaxguy
Simple 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?

------
ksvarma
Simply Great, super neat. Especially that drag around on the nodes. Thank you
for sharing.

------
mrleiter
Really cool tool, thanks! Maybe you could add bold text as well? Just a
thought!

------
rambojazz
Looks like this could be useful for rdf/linked-data. Maybe for json-ld too.

------
janneklouman
Clean and intuitive UI, thank you for creating and sharing.

------
cdeshpande
I cant seem to access it, is it down?

------
binarytide
bitdefender just freaked out on visiting this page. just a heads up

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dtx1
Neato!

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chx
Fabulous.

------
camhart
this is great

