Crumbs

Turn asterisk-indented text lines into mind maps.

Organize your notes in a hierarchical tree structure, using a simple text editor.

• an asterisk at the beginning of the line means level 1
• two asterisk at the beginning of the line means level 2
• and so on...

How crumbs works?

• takes in input a text file and generates a dot script for Graphviz.

• depends on GraphViz

  • look at the bottom for info about how to install graphviz.

Example (without icons)

Create a simple text file - let's say meeting-ideas.txt:

* main idea
** topic 1
*** sub topic
*** sub topic
**** sub topic
**** sub topic
** topic 2
*** sub topic

To create the PNG image you can

• "inject" the text file to crumbs and then the result to dot redirecting the output to the file meeting-ideas.png - (I love the Linux command pipelines! 😍)

cat meeting-ideas.txt | crumbs | dot -Tpng > meeting-ideas.png

• or as alternative you can specify your text file to crumbs directly:

crumbs meeting-ideas.txt | dot -Tpng > meeting-ideas.png

Here the output:

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Example (with icons)

You can, eventually, add images too (one for text line) using a special syntax: [[path/to/image.png]]

• if you specify the flag -image-path you can write [[image.png]] instead of [[path/to/image.png]]
• if you specify the flag -image-type you can write [[path/to/image]] instead of [[path/to/image.png]]
• therefore if you specify both you can write [[image]] instead of [[path/to/image.png]]

* [[./png/bulb.png]] main idea
** topic 1
*** sub topic
*** sub topic
**** [[./png/comments-alt.png]] sub topic
**** sub topic
** [[./png/map-signs.png]] topic 2
*** sub topic

then as usual, let's feed graphviz with crumbs:

crumbs meeting-ideas-with-icons.txt | dot -Tpng > meeting-ideas-with-icons.png

and the output is...

Example (with HTML)

You can enrich the output with a little bit of style, adding some HTML tag.

The following tags are understood:

<b>, <br/>, <i>, <o>, <s>, <sub>, <sup>, <u>

* main idea
** <u>topic 1</u>
*** sub <sub>topic</sub>
*** sub <i>topic</i>
**** <s>sub topic</s>
**** sub <o>topic</o>
** topic <b>2</b>
*** sub <sup>topic</sup>

then as usual, let's feed graphviz with crumbs:

crumbs meeting-ideas-with-html.txt | dot -Tpng > meeting-ideas-with-html.png

and the output is...

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Installation Steps

In order to use the crumbs command, compile it using the following command:

go get -u github.com/lucasepe/crumbs/crumbs

This will create the crumbs executable under your $GOPATH/bin directory.

Ready-To-Use Releases

If you don't want to compile the sourcecode yourself, Here you can find the tool already compiled for:

• MacOS
• Linux
• Windows

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