Organise your ideas, projects and plans
Nick Peers reveals how to use Mindforger to help plan everything from your next shopping list to major home improvement projects.
Are you the kind of person who takes a scattergun approach to project-management? Do you struggle to stay on top of everything from an upcoming class project to recording gift ideas for someone’s birthday? Then Mindforger could be just the tool you need.
The program enables you to organise your life – whether work, personal or a combination of both – into notes and notebooks, which can be adapted to a wide variety of needs. Notes are written in the universal markdown format and can be assigned various properties to make them easy to find while steering you towards getting tasks completed within a set time.
The tool is free and open source, and armed with this tutorial, you’ll be up, running and getting on top of your messy life in no time. If you’re running Ubuntu 19.10 or earlier, you can install Mindforger via its own repo:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ultradvorka/ productivity
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install mindforger
At time of writing (version 1.52.0), we were still waiting for support for Ubuntu 20.04 to appear via the repo route. If it’s still not available when you read this, just download and install the .deb file from https:// github.com/dvorka/mindforger/releases. You’ll need to update this manually going forward.
First run
Launch Mindforger from its Launcher shortcut. You’ll open in Notebooks view. Mindforger has three levels of organisation: Repository Folder>notebook>notes. Repository folders are actual folders, inside which individual notebooks reside as separate Markdown (.md) files. Each notebook is then broken down further into notes, which basically reside within the notebook’s file as individual sections, but which show up in
Mindforger’s interface as separate notes.
The way Mindforger organises information makes it possible to easily separate work from pleasure, or even limit yourself to working with a single notebook at any one time. Choose Mind>new followed by Mindforger Repository to select a suitable directory on your hard drive, or select Markdown File to create a single notebook. You can then switch between recently opened folders and files via the Mind>remind menu, or choose Mind>learn to manually load a folder or file as
required. Note that when working with a single notebook file as opposed to a repository folder, you’ll find that many options – such as View and Notebook menus – are greyed out and unavailable.
When you click a notebook you’ll see a two-paned window providing you with an Outline view on the left – basically the notebook’s structure with individual notes nested inside others in hierarchical form, plus a preview of the currently selected note on the right. Underneath the preview is an Edit button – click this, and the view switches to Mindforger’s Markdown editor.
It’s a good idea to familiarise with how markdown syntax works if you don’t already. Long story short, it’s a method for styling text on the web that was developed by Github for use on its own platform, but has now branched out far and wide. It’s both lightweight and straightforward to use, yet offers a range of sophisticated layout options, such as support for lists, diagrams, images, blockquotes and inline code blocks along with regular text stylings such as bold and italic. Visit https://guides.github.com/features/masteringmarkdown for a good beginner’s guide that reveals most of the syntax you need to know.
The Markdown editor in Mindforger works like a plain text editor on the currently selected note, but features syntax highlighting to help you style your text correctly. You can type this by hand – for example **bold** (which is then displayed in yellow text) or _italic_ (displayed in green), or make use of Mindforger’s Format menu by selecting a block of text and then choosing the appropriate option from it.
You’ll see four buttons beneath the text: Cancel rejects any edits that you make, while Preview opens a preview window next to the edit window so you can see the effects of your changes as you make them. Once you’re happy, click Remember – this terminology (along with Forget for deleting notes and notebooks) is part of
Mindforger’s knowledge ethos. A fourth button – Properties – reveals elements you can assign to each individual note. Navigating between notes is simple enough – just click your choice of note in the Outline view to switch to it; Mindforger will warn you if you have unsaved changes.
Your first notebook
The step-by-step guide (overleaf) reveals how to set up your first notebook, add notes to it, then organise them into a hierarchy through promotions and demotions. You can also rearrange notes from the same Note menu – look for options to move the current note up or down one place or move it straight to the beginning (First) or end (Last) within its current hierarchy.
When you organise your notes into a hierarchy using the Promote and Demote options, beware of one thing: should you wish to delete a parent note, you’ll see a warning telling you that all child notes – those nested beneath the current note – will be deleted. There’s no undo function in Mindforger, so proceed with caution.
When you select Properties under a note, you’ll see a Parent-child relationship dropdown, which enables you to define the relationship between notes nested inside other notes using one of three options: Composition (the default), Aggregation, and ‘Is-a’. These are mere markers – for example, you might think changing a note’s parent-child relationship to aggregation would protect it from being deleted when you delete the parent note, but this doesn’t appear to work.
As you build out your notes, you might find it awkward having to switch between them to view your notebook’s content. If you click the notebook title above the list of notes, you’ll see a Toggle Full Preview button. Click this and it’ll show the entire Markdown file, and thus all your notes, as a single flowing document.
Try a different view
Mindforger’s default view is to list your notebooks, but select View>dashboard and you’ll go to what should be its home screen (you can configure Mindforger to open to this screen via Mind>adapt>application tab – select dashboard from the Start to view dropdown menu).
Here you’ll see a four-paned view. In the top-left corner is an introductory pane with some handy keyboard shortcuts – scroll down and it’ll reveal some statistics about your current Mindforger repo. Beneath this in the bottom-left corner is a list of recent notes by the time last modified – click the Recent Notes or Modified column headers to sort the list differently as required. To the right of this is a list of recent notebooks, which works in a similar way. The final pane – in the topto
right corner – is the Knowledge Graph Navigator, which works like a clickable mind map with multiple levels and is covered in detail in the box (below).
You’ll find other views hidden away under the View menu. Choose View>home Notebook to jump to whichever notebook you assign home notebook status to (open the notebook and choose Notebook>make Home). The Eisenhower Matrix option works with those notebooks you assign levels of importance and urgency too, splitting them into four potential panes: Do soon, Do first, Do sometime and Plan dedicated time.
Tags view simply provides a list of tags – clicking one of these performs a Find Note by Tags search with that tag pre-filled. You can then add extra tags manually. Notes containing the selected tag(s) are then listed – select one and click Open Note or Find Notebook to perform a Find Notebook by Tags search instead. Both search tools can also be accessed via the Recall menu.
Mindforger comes with a CLI bar should you wish to perform command-line operations: select VIEW>CLI. A list of suggested commands is shown – clicking one selects that command and, in the case of the Find Outline by Name command (for searching for notebooks), a list of notebooks to choose from. You can also run Mindforger directly from the command line – see the documentation for more details.
If the user interface becomes too cluttered while working on a specific note, choose View>hoisting. This hides everything except the editor pane, enabling you to focus on editing. Once you’re done, choose View> Hoisting again to switch back to the previous view.
Find content
As you build your collection of notes and notebooks, staying on top of them can become troublesome – there are lots of ways in which you can build links and find what you’re looking for. When it comes to searching, use Mindforger’s Recall menu. To search all your notebooks and notes, make sure you’re in View>notebooks mode before you begin; otherwise only the current notebook is searched.
You’ll find options for searching for both notes and notebooks by their name (keyword) or tag, and there’s also a Full-text Search option that searches across all notebooks (or notes in the currently opened notebook) to help you quickly find what you’re looking for. Searches can be exact, case insensitive or use regular expressions (such as | for an OR search).
Another way to build connections between notes and notebooks is through internal linking. Select Format> Link and you’ll see buttons for linking to notes and notebooks – click one and a complete list of available notes or notebooks are shown, with a keyword search tool at the top to help you narrow your selection quickly.
You’ll also notice you can insert links to files and folders – copies of files can be optionally placed in the mindforger-repository/memory directory (leave the copy option ticked) alongside your notebook files. For an even speedier way to link files or insert an image into your note, just drag and drop from Files into the editor window where you’d like the link or image to appear.
Beyond the basics
Over time you may wish to hide certain notebooks and notes from view – choose Mind>scope to set this up one of two ways. Tick ‘Show Notebooks/notes modified or viewed in recent’ to hide older notebooks and notes. You can also tick ‘Show Notebooks with the following tags’ to only show notebooks matching one or more tags, or combine both filters at once.
Here’s another tip: want to transfer a note to a different notebook? You can copy the note using the Note>clone option, but beware: this produces completely separate and independent copies, so updating one won’t alter the other. To move the note between notebooks, select it and choose Note> Refactor instead. Again, a similar search tool to that found when inserting internal notebook/note links will pop up to help you find your destination notebook. Once selected, the note moves to its new home.
One final tip: Mindforger runs with its thinking mode switched on, which suggests relevant content as you browse, read and edit notes. It can be Cpu-intensive, so choose Mind>sleep to switch it off if it has a noticeable drag on performance (choose Mind>think to bring it back). When switched on, look for the Associations table beneath the notes list – this contains a list of suggested links complete with a relevancy score (in percentage terms). When editing notes, you may also see relevant keywords pop up as you type – click one to insert it quickly into your text.