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Thinktool
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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.)
Posted by Paul Korm
May 1, 2020 at 05:33 PM
Sorry, I must be missing the point. Your post mentioned Roam-style linking—which means [[links like this]]. That doesn’t work in the demo.
I’m trying this on a Mac so maybe ThinkTool is Windows-only?
Looks like a simplified outliner.
Posted by Jonas Hvid
May 1, 2020 at 06:10 PM
Hey Paul
Thanks a bunch for the feedback; it help me a lot with figuring out how to
explain Thinktool to people, so I appreciate it.
By Roam-style linking, I really just mean “bidirectional links”. That is, when
you create a link from Item 1 to Item 2, then looking at Item 2 will
automatically show you that such a link exists.
The specific implementation differs from Roam. Instead of typing the link
directly, you can press Alt+L or select “Link” in the toolbar at the top to
insert a link. Then you type the name/content of the item that you want to link
to.
Clicking on the link opens the linked-to item directly underneath the link
itself. Under the linked-to item, you can see its “references”, which shows all
the places where that item is linked to.
I hope that explanation makes sense.
Also, if you don’t mind helping me out a bit: Did you go through the tutorial? I
don’t expect most people to go through the tutorial, but if you did then I
should probably work on making the tutorial a little bit more clear. (Otherwise,
I’ll see if I can do something else to make the linking system more intuitive.)
Also, it should work on Mac (if not that’s a bug). Actually, I’m developing it
on Linux, and testing with Chrome and Firefox. (Mobile support is a bit wonky
right now, but technically works—for some definition of “works”.)
Posted by jaslar
May 1, 2020 at 09:21 PM
I went to the page via my elementaryOS machine, then to Demo. I gather that I’m supposed to be able to click on “new item” and get an entry—but the option is grayed out, and I can’t select it. Nor can I add anything by pressing Enter. Intriguing idea, though, and I’m always glad to see new developers offerings interesting takes.
Posted by Jonas Hvid
May 2, 2020 at 02:36 PM
Thanks for the bug report, jaslar.
That’s right, you’re supposed to click “New” to create a new item. Previously,
this button was only active if you first clicked an existing item first, which I
suspect may have been the problem. I went ahead and made it so that it also
works with nothing selected now, which is a little more intuitive.
And thanks for the encouragement. Thinktool is a bit of an experiment in
designing outliners, so I’m glad that other people also find the idea
interesting.