eyedact

Make freeze-dried web searches using text mind-maps.

npm install -g eyedact

Eyedact is an alternative means to type a Google search using your own typed notes covering a complex domain.

What's wrong with Googling stuff directly?

Nothing. Alt+Tab to your browser, Ctrl+L, type and hit Enter. If you know what you are looking for, you don't need this. This is for people who are studying and want to lock down specific searches to repeat until they know what to find on their own.

Eyedact addresses a niche in note-taking and review. Someone who knows nothing about aerospace engineering can still jot down a loose mindmap relating concepts together. When they want to review, they use Eyedact to search for concepts using terms that are too vague for Google and still get results in the context for their subject. Hence "freeze dried" web searches.

In the example below, you will see notes acting as a source of searches that one would not need after becoming sufficiently familiar with Mongo.

Example

I write loose mindmaps in text files to avoid fussing with GUIs and proprietary file formats. The structure is simple: indent concepts when they belong to the concept on a previous line.

Given the offensively incomplete text file ~/notes/mongo for a new student of document stores:

Mongo
    Databases
        collections
            documents
                key-value pairs
                IDs are 12 byte hex values called _id
        cursors
    Aggregation pipeline
        map-reduce
        stages
    Best practices
        Join on write, not read
        Optimize for most frequent use cases
        Sharding for horizontally scaling
    Benefits
        Any field is indexable
        Easy to replicate and scale
    Commands
        use
        show
        createCollection
        show collections
        insert()
        find()
        limit()
        pretty()
        remove()
        save()
        skip()
        sort()
        update()

Put this in ~/.bashrc:

alias s?='eyedact ~/notes/mongo`

Now you can do this:

$ s? '*practices' # Search Google+I'm Feeling Lucky for "Mongo best practices"
$ s? '*remove*' '*skip*' # "Mongo Commands remove()" and "Mongo Commands skip()", in new tabs

Eyedact only searches for the first glob match and opens your default browser to Google using all the concepts leading up to that match.

Until you learn what to look for (making s? unnecessary), you can use vague globs to contextualize searches. Even if you run a query would still work fine if typed into Google directly, it's nice to have a shorter search query fire up your browser with the pages you need already up. That is, it's nice if you are a terminal junkie that can't be bothered with windows.