Mind map

h-m-m

Hacking seems like it should be spontaneous. You get an urge to break something apart or find out how it works, and you dive in without too much thought about the consequences. However, it seems that with this tool, hackers also need some time to plan and contemplate. That's because h-m-m is a mind-mapping tool for the command line, and it's an acronym for "hackers mind map." It seems to have been purposefully named to incite a shrug of indifference. Memory map tools usually help you log ideas and link them together as a map, a little like a train network of stations and routes. Memory mapping applications have been around for many years, but because of their visual nature, there are few examples that can be run from the command line instead of in a graphical environment. But this is what h-m-m does, on the command line, graphically illustrating the stations, or nodes, with simple ASCII much like the output to the humble tree command.

Installation is also unusual for a command-line tool because h-m-m is written in PHP. You simply download the script and run it against whatever PHP executable you have installed (if you still have PHP installed). The result is no different from any other command-line binary, and being written in PHP should at least mean h-m-m runs almost anywhere. Also, being a tool designed for hackers, every h-m-m function has a keyboard shortcut, and this is where you start. You press Enter to create a new entry, and you press Tab to create a new child node. Pressing Y will copy a node and d will delete a node, while pressing e will edit the current selected node, which can be navigated using h, j, k, and l or the arrow keys. As you might have noticed, these are the same key bindings that are used by the Vim text editor, which means many of us will be able to use h-m-m without too much difficulty.

Project Website

https://github.com/nadrad/h-m-m

Organize your thoughts as a graphic mind map from the command line with h-m-m.

Image generator