Thinktool

Posted by Jonas Hvid
May 1, 2020 at 04:44 PM

Hello everyone! I want to show you all a new note-taking application that I’ve
been working on, which some of you may find interesting.

It’s called Thinktool, and although it’s still in early development, you can
check it out here: https://thinktool.io

The idea behind Thinktool is to combine two different approaches to note-taking
in a single app: “Associative” note-taking approaches like those found in
TheBrain, Roam Research and Zettelkasten-inspired systems; and “hierarchical”
systems, like those found in traditional outliners.

I really like applications like Roam and TheBrain because they let you easily
add a bunch of notes and then explore them in a natural way.

However, I find that their approaches break down when you start to get a lot of
notes. At that point, you need the ability to organize your notes into a more
rigid system. It’s not impossible to do this with Roam and TheBrain, but neither
one of them are as nice to use as a simple outliner in my opinion.

Thinktool is an experiment in creating an application that has all the features
of an outliner, but which actually uses an associative approach under the hood.
In practice, this means that Thinktool supports both Roam-style linking and
multiple parents (i.e. transclusion).

If this sounds interesting, check it out! I’m very interested in getting
feedback.

- Jonas

(P.S. If you remember seeing Thinktool before, it’s probably because I posted
about it in another thread. But I recently added a proper tutorial, so I wanted
to make another post now that it’s a bit closer to being actually usable.)