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by markawesome 2085 days ago
While I enjoy tools like draw.io---I much prefer something like XMind because I don't want to have to manually connect nodes, and it becomes overly tedious. Tools like draw.io are designed primarily for point and click, and people that love moving their mouse around constantly. This doesn't make me feel very productive, when I can use keyboard shorcuts to create an entire diagram in half the time and then go back and customize the nodes, adding boxes, etc.

Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a good markup generator for this type of diagramming or mind mapping. All the ones I've searched for fall short of the basic features compared to something like XMind, which is unfortunate. PlantUML is descent, and so is Graphviz, but they both fall short. Markmap as well fails tremendously in only offering linear designs. I hope some coder will see this and explore using YAML and a markup formating for creating diagrams, mindmaps, etc. Or just using markdown, but adding features for boxes, summary nodes, etc.

1 comments

Not sure if this has anything to do with what you had in mind, but user veuxdo pointed me at it earlier today

https://www.ilograph.com/

I found it interesting anyway. Everything from yaml, automated layout, drilldown, etc.

While I'm only interested in an open source solution, the YAML formatting they are using is almost exactly the style I was looking for. That would be a huge improvement to the current tooling available. I didn't see anything though, without signing up, that indicates that this would work well for mindmapping as well and implementing features like summaries:

https://xmind-help.github.io/en/summary.html

I build https://sourcespy.com to achieve the same goal - automated layout, drilldown but also ability to pull up the diagram contents from the code.
Just tried checking it out and the site appears to be down.