jeffreybenjaminbrown / mindmaps

What these files are

.mm files are mindmaps, which are graphs of text. You can read about why mindmaps are so awesome here.

fresh.mm is the file I write to most frequently. Things in fresh.mm can be about anything. The other files have particular topics: art.mm is about art, etc. The two exceptions are go.mm, which is (generally old) instructions to myself, and discard.mm, which is probably not very important.

In the tech/ subfolder:

• coding.mm is projects I was building
• use.mm is how to use things (like Unix, sed, etc.)
• lang.mm is about programming languages

Getting your computer to display a mindmap

To use these, you will need to install a mindmap application that recognizes the .mm format. I suggest Freeplane -- it's simple, powerful, popular, free, open-source, and available for Linux, Mac and Windows.

Once you've got a mindmap app, you'll need to download a mindmap and open it from your own computer. If you are not comfortable using "git clone", the simplest way to open one of them this:

(1) Point your browser to one of the mindmaps. (Those hyperlinks above in .mm all go to mindmaps.)

(2) The resulting page should look mostly like gibberish, because it is designed to be read by Freeplane, not a human. However, it will have a button called Raw at the top right corner. Click there, and you'll be brought to a plain text page, again mostly gibberish. Save that file to your hard drive.

(3) Find the file on your hard drive, and click on it.

Reading and navigating a mindmap

To navigate around a file in Freeplane is easy -- it only takes five commands! They are: up, down, left, right and spacebar. The spacebar unfolds|shows or folds|hides the contents of a branch. Contents can be thought of as children, branching off from the parent.

To go into more detail I need to define a few terms.

What the mindmap means

Graph and mindmap vocab

A graph is a collection of nodes and edges.

An edge is a line connecting two nodes.

A tree is a graph with the strange property that while a node can have many children, it can only have one parent. In a tree every edge connects a child to its parent.

A .mm document is a tree in which every node is a string of text.

Every tree has a root node, which is unique in that it has no parents, only children. It can usefully be thought of as the center of the graph. Every node in a tree is descended from the root.

A leaf is a node with no children. A node is interior if it is not a leaf. The root is interior (unless it has no children, in which case you'd have to call it a leaf).

A path is a sequence of connected nodes in a graph.

If a node has children, and they have children, etc., all of those children together are called its descendents. Similarly, the set of nodes it is descendent from are its predecessors. The root is a predecessor of every node.

A branch is a connected set of nodes leafward of some node, which you might call the root of the branch.

These trees are directed! One way is "up".

Traditionally, up = rootward and down = leafward.

Every leaf is connected to the root through a series of interior nodes. (In fact so are all the interior nodes.) The root and leaves define a sense of direction: rootward v. leafward, up toward the root v. down away from the root. On screen in these documents that relationship (almost always) displays as left=rootward v. right=leafward, because I keep (almost) everything on the right side of the root. I will use the terms up and down, though, because that is the tradition in computer science. (Strangely, that tradition implies that the root is at the top. It feels natural soon enough.)

Once you reach a leaf, you cannot descend further in the graph. If you are at an interior node rather than a leaf, Freeplane indicates it by painting a little circle at the lower right corner of the node.

Graph connections supplement English content

Many nodes are meaningful entirely out of context. One can ascertain their meaning just by looking at the text they contain. If a node is not immediately meaningful in isolation, the nodes around it -- especially but not only its children -- will clarify it. In general, if above (rootward) is unclear, descending leafward clarifies.

That's most of it!

You now have access to most of the meaning of these mindmaps.

If you want them to make even more sense yet, you will need to learn (don't worry, it's very small!) my graph language. In case that seems uncalled for to you, I should point out that it starts by explaining why I felt I had to make such a thing. It is itself a mindmap, but you already know everything you need to read it.