One of the boasting points of Obsidian is that you can instantly see a graph of how your notes are linked together. (Not everyone agrees that it’s an important feature).
I know we have had similar projects in TW, but I’m not sure where they’re at right now nor how well they work. So, what’s the current state of the art?
https://be-rad-scribe.tiddlyhost.com/
Here is a quick demo of tiddlymap and echarts brain I made just now. I was working on a wide screen monitor so I made the Maps wide and tall to utilise the available space. i don’t know how it will look in small screens. Also I don’t use Maps much. This is just for demo purpose. I just assembled together all these plug ins (Tiddlymap maintained by @Flibbles, echarts maintained by @Sttot and the layout is based on be-rad edition by @Brian_Radspinner).
Last three buttons on the right side are for Maps- 2 tiddlymaps (live and advanced) and 1 echarts TheBrain
Thanks for that!
So, if I wrote …
Map relationships Graphically
Using the TiddlyMap plugin, you can display a graphical map depicting relationships between notes (tiddlers) by forward links, back links, tagged notes, or tagged-by notes,
I wouldn’t be misleading anyone, right?
I am a pure user. I am using both TiddlyWiki and Obsidian now.
(I use Obsidian more than 1 year. And I start to use TiddlyWiki last month.)
Obsidian has two offical feature about graph, that is Graph View and Canvas.
And a lot of great graph plugins, for example Excalidraw.
About Obsidian Graph View (using graph to display connection between notes), just like @arunnbabu81 says.
About Obsidian Canvas (this is more like tranditional mind-map), TiddlyWiki has plugin TW-whiteboard.
I think TiddlyMap is more powerful than Obsidian Graph (since it can create custom linking), but it’s manipulation way is also more complecated (need more time to learn). By the way, Obsidian Graph and Echarts is prettier in my opinion.
But the key point is that Obsidian has Canvas, Canvas is really powerful (since it can quick search user notes to add in graph, add pure custom text cards, add custom tag on link, add any media in library, add external link, even more embed external link like video so that we can watch video in Obsidian, and it can use all color by color-picker, etc…). And this is why I can’t complete switch from obsidian to Tiddlywiki since Tiddlywiki can’t really make a tanditional mind-map
.
P.s. I really love TiddlyWiki
, but when I using TiddlyWiki, I feel it loss some features for create tanditional mind-map, even use TiddlyMap + TW-whiteboard + Echarts + Mermaid. Since every note in TiddlyMap is tiddler. But sometimes I prefer to use a pure text node (Just like the cards in Obsidian Canvas). Although, we can use TW-whiteboard to draw a simple tanditional mind-map, but it reallt need more features (take a look at Obsidian Canvas). And for Echarts and Mermaid, they all need to write codes (need lots time to learn😂).
Try WhiteBoard plugin. It is still under development, if you are familiar to tldraw, you can try join the development. Obsidian Canvas is close-sourced, so I don’t like it.
I have experimented with TiddlyMap but I have over two thousand tiddlers so it all gets a bit overwhelmed and doesn’t deliver what I want but it still conceptually resonates with what I have in my mind but I think its probably very tough to design large visual representations that are effective - not a fault of TiddlyMap but more an expression of the problem.
I think the following is still ‘on topic’ given the title - my current direction has been experimenting with creating special tiddlers which I tag with the word ‘group’ and title with a suitable name for the group- the tiddler contains a list of the tiddlers I want to include in the group. It’s completely analagous to group items in most graphics packages - delete the special group tiddler and the items are ungrouped. It’s different to using a tag to associate a cluster of tiddlers and may represent a temporary association. The quest of trying to get that magic overview of a large knowledge base continues… in the meantime partial solutions each with strong and weak points is where I am at.
At the moment I do use Streams for brainstorming. … I did find a nice MindMap library, but didn’t have time to implement it … yet.
The link concept would be very similar to streams. So the connection is stored in a parent field. That would make it possible to use the same structure for both libraries…
There is tidgraph as well for a quick light weight implementation but it could probably use some love.
My Nearby plugin doesn’t count … yet.
One goal from the beginning was to try to make a visual representation of the nearest neighbors. I ran into limits of my own TW skills and it’s been languishing for two months. I would like to revisit it as my skills improve.
