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82 sats \ 5 replies \ @didiplaywell 25 Sep \ on: Generating quick mindmaps alter_native
Interesting!
I share the thought that mind-maps are more about learning than sharing information. I was a fan for years of mind-maps, used them for real and complex tasks at work. My predilect tool has always been FreePlane. It's fully featured and all-powerful, I was never able to find its end or something it could not do. However, with time I settled with plain markdown in obsidian and never looked back again.
Yes. Freeplane is really good. Simple example above might have clickable links on Merriam-Webster for instance.
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Will give Freeplane a go then!
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Remember: it's fully featured. You can set up reminders, progress bars, and (extremely useful) filters. It's a furious organizer-machine. But, the one thing that made me ditch it was that I realized I worked most of the time with long text form, for which freeplane resulted increasingly unwieldy, the reason I went for markdown/obsidian.
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Thanks to Obsidian, I have been typing up extracts of phrases I like from books to see if there are any insights I particularly gravitate towards. Would you know how to use Obsidian as a second brain? I imagined links flying from one book to another to yet another, but I don’t know how to activate it
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After using freeplane almost "professionally" for years, I realized I didn't use inter-links as often, and just inline-written referrals wherever needed. But with time I realized that whenever I needed more than just an inter-link reminder, I actually needed to reorganize text.
I found out I was fully covered with plain text outlines and two fundamental navigation tools: the file search bar at the left (big picture), and the table of contents bar at the right (local picture). It allows me to see much more information and connections in a much more compact space.
The "connection-like" effect is caused thus as follows:
- At the left you have the tree structure of all files
- At the right you have the tree structure of the document
- At the center, by outlining, you have the tree structure of the local ideas.
That makes it a breeze to navigate everything at every scale, so I don't even use the "connections graph" obsidian is so famed for.
In contrast to this, mind-maps are exactly like looking for things in google maps: you have to zoom in and out and essentially "physically" walk through the document, for everything is visual. It's super cool for small, local diagrams (which is what markdown correctly reduces graphs to), but not for big-scale file/document structure. A mind-map is actually the exact opposite of markdown: it's graph-first, with auxiliary local texts, while markdown is text-first, with auxiliary local graphs.
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