Tidgraph mind mapping experience minireport and queries

Since mind mapping was introduced to me in early 2000’s I have been using it extensively, particularly for presentations, using Freeplane. That means that:

  • I need to carry my laptop with me, even when a presenters laptop is available on site, as Freeplane probably will not be installed there, I’ll not have permission to install it and portable versions have shown several errors on site (particularly with finding the Java Portable version or the one installed already).
  • I can not reuse/recombine mind map nodes, because of the monolithic nature of Freeplane documents (as happens with word processing or presentation documents).

So I have been experimenting with Tidgraph for mind mapping, as it provides a low cognitive/computational resource to put mind maps in TW.

The result, so far, looks promising:

and I immediately start to experiment the “textual algebra” for ideas that @jeremyruston talked in some podcast interview, thinking in new combinations via tagging, filtering and custom fields, now that mind map nodes are the module for ideas expression and recombination instead of complete mind maps. For example: “build this map starting with this node, using this filter and ordering according to this custom field”.

But to make such scenario possible, I have some feature request, issues and queries I would like to share:

  1. Ideally the text field should be the one that can be shown in the node map, as is the one that is used naturally in TW to store and shown the “main” content of the tiddler/node and do experiments. But using the text node can lead quickly to recursion and Internal Javascript errors. To overcome that I created a “content” field and a preview macro, so I can fill it out comfortably in the tiddler, but then other functionality like @saqimtiaz’s don’t work properly, at least in my initial test (I imagine they’re desgined to use the text field somehow).
  2. The width of nodes is shared accordingly to their deepness. So, all level 4th deepness nodes will have a particular width, all 5th deepness nodes will share it too and so on. That creates a strange GUI experience y comparison with other mind mapping programs, as usually you need different widths for nodes with the same deepness, depending on their content, particularly, when you have images and text in nodes of different mind map (sub)branches. Ideally, the node width should be different for each node with a default width that can be change it, if needed. I imagine that is somehow related with a CSS property and some kind of internal map representation as a table, so nodes are really located in a shared column, but that is just a hypothesis. If it were true, maybe the model should be instead associated with the “branches as rows” where columns can have variable width.
  3. If node width can not be changed for different node to provide a functionality as described above, maybe a node zoom/detail could be added, for example having a dual column feature, where the mind map occupies the wider one at the left, and node details are shown in the column at right, maybe with extended functionality that is not available given the restriction described in point 1.
  4. Would be nice to have a way to collapse all children of a given mind map branch. It is pretty useful for presentation purposes.
  5. Would be nice to have colored nodes, for example, according to tag colors of ancestor nodes. That gives a visual clue to the mind map reader about which map branch are you located right now, and is a feature available.

Feedback is welcomed and thanks for the tools that make these explorations possible.

Cheers,

Offray

BTW, I tried to use @DaveGifford’s Stroll and @BurningTreeC’s multi-column combined with Tidgraph, but when I click on a mind map node, instead of opening in the right side column, the keyboard+click combination opens a new browser window or tab with the wiki tiddler loaded. Other keyboard+click combinations work as expected, but not when the clicking link is inside a mind map view.

Have you checked out TiddlyMap.org | Wiki-Based Concept-Mapping Software ?

I’m not sure the tidgraph author is active here any more which is a shame as its one of my favorite plugins.

Yes, I knew about TiddlyMap previously. But, the I don’t like the force layout it uses for presentations and it is more resource intensive for maps of the similar size.

Maybe someone who knows more about of CSS can help us with then. Or the authors of Stroll and/or Multicolum layouts can help here with why Tidgraph is opening tiddlers in a new tab/window instead of in the side column.

Any help is welcomed.

Offray

The default behaviour is that tiddlers are opened at the top of the story river and the URL is updated to the permalink for that tiddler, so that might affect the expected behaviour.

I’ve no idea how it would be changed to normal tiddler linkness.

I am the main author of Stroll, but the column code came from @saqimtiaz and I can’t help you on that part. I am sure that is the part of Stroll that is interfering. Saq has said in the past that he created it only for Stroll and does not have any interest in maintaining it as a separate plugin. I did try integrating Stroll and TiddlyMap very early on to further recreate the Roam Research experience, and it didn’t work.

This modification should open tiddler in the story river as the normal tiddler although I am not sure how to release it. It might be not working in the tabset.

plugin_ihm_tidgraph_v0.9.7_20241130.json (60.7 KB)

2 Likes

That does the job! Thank you!

Thanks a lot for your help.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work, as you can see in my dual river mind map wiki. When you do [Shift] + [Click] on the “Muffin 1” link in the Welcome to Stroll, it opens in a new river at the right. If you [Shift] + [Click] in the Nodes Templates Demo on the same tiddler link, but this time it opens at the top in the same river, instead of the river at the right side.

Also, I notice that the “plus” / “minus” sign in the mind map doesn’t appear anymore, after installing your patch (note the screenshot below and the red arrow in it), which erases an important visual clue for folded nodes regarding if they contain children nodes and they become just like regular nodes without children.

I’m going to migrate my experiments to TiddlySeq Theme, based on Elixir mind map, as now I understand better the limitations of Tidgraph and also the posibilities of Elixir mind map regarding usage of images, rich HTML content and storage format.

Thanks again,

Sorry I don’t export the symbols.

Not sure how to handle multiple columns which might require special js codes.

plugin_ihm_tidgraph_v0.9.8_20241202.json (62.1 KB)

2 Likes

I’ve had another look at the TiddlySeq site and I think where it falls down for me still is the extra complexity. Tidgraph will pick up and add things as I tag them (Don’t look at my list of tags), so I don’t have to worry about it, but it looks like I’d have to handcraft each Seq mindmap. (PLease prove me incompetent and wrong, opening up the use of Seq!) :slight_smile:

I liked that Tidgraph used tagging as a way to create parenthood between branches and the horizontal layout with low cognitive/computational resources. But in practice, making detailed maps is cumbersome compared with other mind mappers, that support keyboard shortcuts and live preview as the mind map is written/drawn. TiddlySeq, with its collection of plugins already provides me a good starting point. I have not figure out the JSON storage part of the map, but I think that a simple experiment will clarify its possibilities, now that I understand better the node types that Mind Map Elixir supports. I will start making some translation test between Tidgraph and TiddlySeq and share some questions as my experiments advance.

Cheers,

Your tweaking is much appreciated. Thankyou.