Mind is an organizer tool. It can be used to accomplish and implement a wide variety of workflows. It is designed to quickly add items in trees. Why a tree? Well, list of things like TODO lists are great but they lack the organization part. Most of them can be gathered in “lists of lists” — you probably have that on your phone. A list of list is basically a tree. But editing and operating a list of list is annoying, so it’s better to have a tool that has the concept of a node and a tree as a primitive.
Mind trees can be used to implement workflows like:
- Journaling. Have a node for each day, which parent will be the month, which parent will be the year, etc.
- Note taking. You are in the middle of a meeting and you heard something important? Don’t write that in a Markdown
document in your
~/documentsthat is probably already a mess: open your Mind tree and add it there! - “Personal wiki.” Because of the nature of a tree, it is convenient to organize your personal notes about your work services, other teams’ products, OKRs, blablabla by simply creating trees in trees!
- Task management. Why not having a tasks tree with three or four sub-trees for your backlog, on-going work, finished work and cancelled tasks? It’s all possible!
The possibilities are endless.
Mind features two main concepts; global trees and local trees:
- A global tree is a tree that is unique to your machine / computer. Opening your main Mind tree from Neovim will always open and edit that tree. It’s basically your central place for your Mind nodes.
- A local tree is a tree that is relative to a given directory. Mind implements a
cwd-based local form of tree, so you can even share those trees with other people (as long as they use Mind as well).
Atop of that, Mind has the concept of “project” trees, which are either a global tree, or a local tree. A global
project tree is stored at the same place as your main tree and the purpose of such a tree is to be opened only when your
cwd is the same as the tree, but you don’t want the tree to be in the actual cwd. That can be the case if you work
on a project where you don’t want to check the tree in Git or any versioning system.
On the other side, a local project tree is what it means: it lives in the cwd, under .mind, basically.
Besides that, Mind allows you to manipulate trees and nodes. Feature set:
- Everything is interactive.
- Cursor-base interaction. Open a tree and start interacting with it!
- Expand / collapse nodes.
- Add a node to a tree by adding it before or after the current node, or by adding it inside the current node at the beginning or end of its chilren.
- Rename the node under the cursor.
- Change the icon of the node under the cursor.
- Delete the node under the cursor with a confirmation input.
- Select a node to perform further operations on it.
- Move nodes around!
- Select nodes by path! — e.g.
/Tasks/On-going/3345: do this
- Supports user keybindings via keymaps. Keymaps are namespaced keybindings. They keymaps are fixed and defined by Mind, and users can decide what to put in them. For instance, you have the default keymap for default navigation, selection keymap for when a node is selected, etc. etc.
- Nodes are just text, icons and some metadata by default. You can however decide to associate them with a data file, for which the type is user-defined (by default Markdown), or you can turn them into URL nodes.
- A data node will open its file when triggered.
- A URL node will open its link when triggered.
- More to come!
