A few hours ago and the subject of GUI-based software would have been
the last thing I thought I'd want to phlog about, but here I am about
the proclaim the (quite basic) wonders of mind-mapping software
labyrinth[1].

I've been doing some 'digital housekeeping' alongside a hell of a lot
of studying lately. I've been returning to bash & CLI *nix basics,
studying from O'Reilly's 'Learning the Bash Shell, 3rd ed.' and
Wiley's 'The Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting Bible' (I've got
an arts/humanities background in academia and even though I work
somewhat in digital (Web tech), I'm self-taught on *nix-based stuff as
of only the past few years - and over the past few months I've been
trying pretty hard to reign in my own tendency to rush ahead to get
sometimes ambitious projects up and running, and instead return to the
bread n' butter basics of the shell, to really get this stuff down).
So, there I am organising a few files, projects, notes and dusting off
a few half-cooked *nix projects, and I stumbled upon some mind-mapping
application I'd downloaded a couple of years back, but never really
used.

As a simple experiment, I started playing with labyrinth to create
little visual 'clusters' of my systems, on a basic top-down level.
Soon enough I had created a visual overview, which I then spent a few
more hours adding to and tweaking, and that brought me some good
clarity on a few things. I initially used this to map my systems (home
servers and some VPS's) and their core functions, arrange them in a
way that visually made sense, and then build on this by bringing in
some external services/net ecologies that I'm connected to, as well as
some plans and projects, and also bring in some colour-coding on a few
details (e.g. aliases, identities or the 'character'* of certain
projects and parts of the terrain).

A few hours later and I had ended up with something that helped bring
me a whole bunch of clarity on a few things - a useful and instructive
process, and it also helped take me out of my regular way of
thinking/filing/processing. The touchscreen laptop I'm using is also
really useful with this kind-of software as well, as I can easily drag
around elements and get away from the other STDINs. 

I can't see myself using this thing all the time, but everynow and
then, if you need to lay out some general 'terrain', map it out, tweak
it, break it and work through it ~~ travel it ~~ then I now totally get
the appeal and function of this process and tool.

~moji

[1] https://github.com/labyrinth-team/labyrinth