The difficulty of walking and chewing bubblegum at the same time

Try markdown-mindmap as an atom-editor package to visualize mind maps written in markdown.

Taking notes

Taking notes in meetings is something I really struggle, especially if I try to participate in the conversation at the same time.

I’ve mitigated this issue in two ways:

Delegation

My preferred way is to delegate the task of creating notes to someone else.

I’ve been able to pull this off (using my divine powers as a small-time CEO), but I really cannot expect this option to be always available. This also tends to make me annoyed by my own incompetence.

So, the only way to make myself feel better is to suck it up and try to improve.

Mind maps

Writing mind maps is a nice way to take notes. The concept and execution is simple enough to work, even if I’m totally unable to multitask.

I suppose I don’t need to feel bad about that after reading this article.

Anyway, I’ve always relied on some software for creating the mind maps. For starters, my handwriting is horrible and with software you get the freedom of reorganizing and restructuring the mind map (later) as you please.

First I used FreeMind. It got the job done, but it had some graphical glitches when running on Linux Mint Debian Edition.

I re-installed my workstation around Christmas 2017, switched to Debian Stretch and decided to give VYM a try. It felt leaner than FreeMind, had no glitches and also got the job done.

But I wasn’t quite satisfied.

Markdown to the rescue

Browsing the Hacker News I stumbled into text2mindmap. As I nowadays write most of my notes in Markdown anyway, I was intriqued.

However, I wanted a tool which could be run on my local workstation and without a network connection.

Couple of minutes in Google and I found markdown-mindmap.