Feature request: Interactive mindmap for documents showing their relations

It would be a really useful addition to be able to create mindmap like workspaces where we can put links to notes and documents stored/indexed by devonthink and let us connect them with edges to show relations to visually organize our knowledge stored in devonthink (not automatic like the word cloud but interactive, user generated).

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If u are referring to “user interactive”, you can do it now:
Use your favourite/popular mind map app, build ur map, and copy the item link of DT group or document within each node. You have a map map that is connected to the relevant links in DT. And u can index or import the mind map into Dt, too.

You see the item DocD in the lower right hand corner? That’s an item link from DT, click on it or click on the icon next to “Plan” and you can jump right to the DT group/document. I am just using mind node as demo. If you save this map in DT, u can access and edit everything in the same place (well you still need to open the map in the mind map app, but the two apps are next to each other just like two windows of the same app). I believe that most mindmap apps accept hyperlink these days and for those app (like mindnode), u can even copy and paste the item link in the node directly as the node name.


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Thank you for your reply! I was indeed playing around with MindNode as well, but I was looking for something more integrated and more free form. Also, drag and drop doesn’t really work for me directly from Devonthink (it does from the finder), however copying links from DT and entering them via the “add link” function in MindNode does. It is just that when you go through hundreds of articles and try to organize them, such workarounds quickly turn the workflow into something you dont want to do often.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could have an automatically generated “mindmap” template showing all the documents in a group or tag waiting for you to create the relations between them. In particular it would show you everything and if you add something new, you would see that there is a new node you have to connect to the rest.

Going even further, I could imagine a new desktop-like visual/contextual view of a group’s content that you could interact with and move documents around and create relations between them as you like.

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You can highlight all (or any selection of) the documents in a group, use the Table of Contents tool, and then just drag the links in the Table of Contents en masse into MindNode. They come in as separate nodes (displaying the document name and linking back to DT), so you’d be free create relations among them however you want.

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Yeah, also would be really neat to have a section where similar topic show in a mind-map like structure.

Like this…but for “related topics”

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Nice! My Mindnode trial has run out but that’s an interesting behavior for sure.

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It would be interesting to do a mind map visualization that lets you see all the links within a doc.

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Cool thanks, that is a good solution for organizing a fixed collection. Now I just to figure out how to automatically add a link to the mindmap whenever I add a document to the group…

Btw, this also works in the same way in iThoughtsX.

IMHO, if we are assuming that DT has only the resource to focus on one new killing feature in the next iteration, on-top of the never-ending perfection of current features (UI, Mark-up format, intelligence of OCR, fully compatible features of Desktop and Web Server edition, next iOS version, etc.), I would rather the resource be committed to:

(1) the continuous addition of integration with popular apps (among DT users) by working with other app developers to produce more import and export templates/interface.

(2) Explore the potential of extending the concordance function to other areas in DT. For example, (a) allow user to use the word-cloud/map in different ways by allowing the customisation of the current automatically generated word list, or (b) extend the smart rule of auto-tagging to be based on (a).

(3) Explore the role of DevonAgent in DT3.

Just my 5 cents

I would expect that the next new “killing feature” is a complete re-write of DEVONthink to Go. Currently it is woefully outdated and needs to become an app that can stand on its own, rather than the adjunct to DEVONthink for macOS as it has been in the past.

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:+1::clap: 100% agreed.

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I don’t use Mindnode nor mind mapping (and changed to Scapple for stand-alone concept mapping years ago), but I have experimented with your suggestion, and it works beautifully. Better yet, there is no need to open the TOC file and drag the links within. Drag the whole TOC file from DT into Mindnode, and all links within the files are spreading out automatically as a list of nodes. This method is handy.

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Wow. That is “better yet”. Don’t know why I never thought to try that. Thanks.

This…

This…

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And you all may be aware of Tinderbox and its integration with DEVONthink which takes what y’all are talking about to a new level.

I found these videos from the amazing Beck Tench on how she uses mind mapping and note taking in an approach called ‘zettlekasten’ to be enlightening. Over the course of them she formulates a thought and details it using a mind map with her DT notes supporting her research and citations. She precisely elaborates a connection between research areas, and through her expression of the connections, she clarifies her thinking, closest thing to academic writing with a mind map you’ll see.

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Thanks for sharing! Tinderbox indeed looks like a very unique approach.

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Very interesting - thanks for sharing.

With Tinderbox and other minmapping tools, is there a way to publish/share the mindmaps, or is this only for personal use by the author?

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Plus One!

Quick question – I presume that those who use MindNode by dragging in a DT3 ToC file, have the relevant file open inside DT3 when clicking on the MindNode link?

I’m seeing nothing happening this side. The focus does indeed jump from MindNode to DT3, but no ‘new’ file/window associated with the x-devonthink-item// back in MindNode is opened… Any suggestions?

:+1: that would be great