eyedact

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

npm i eyedact

Eyedact is an alternative means to Google using typed mindmaps 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 Eyedact. This is for people who are figuring out how to navigate a specific knowledge domain.

Eyedact targets autodidacts that want to find out what they need to know to work on something, especially when they aren't sure what to look for. Eyedact lets you write searches 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.

CLI 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()

For the sake of explicit manual prep, put this in ~/.bashrc:

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

Now you can do this:

$ s? reduce --lucky # Search Google+I'm Feeling Lucky for "Mongo aggregation pipeline map-reduce"
$ s? practices # Search Google (not feeling lucky) for "Mongo best practices"
$ s? collection show --all # Open one tab for each match (without --all, use only first match)

Eyedact checks if the string you enter appears in any of the lines of the mindmap to find a match. You do not have to know what's in a mindmap before searching, you only need to recall some term.

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.

CLI

$ eyedact MINDMAPFILE needle [needle [needle [...]] [--lucky] [--all]

• MINDMAPFILE: Path to text file containing concepts indented to show relationships between ideas in a knowledge domain. If set to -, eyedact will read from STDIN.
• needle: At least one string to match against lines in the mindmap. If the needle appears inside a line, its a match.
• --lucky/-l: Use Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" feature.
• --all/-a: Search for every match, not just the first.

Stdin example

# Open React and Redux tutorials
$ curl https://pastebin.com/raw/qNWujKhc | eyedact - tutorial -al

Writing implicit project stack documentation

Eyedact also helps as a way to document what you expect other people to know, without writing much yourself. You can place a map showing what you need contributors to know to work on your project.

GraphQL
    Apollo assumptions (see Dhaivat Pandya speech)
        Same path, same object
        Same ID, same object
    caching
    best practices
    server
    client
    schemas
    queries
    selection sets
        go within queries
        define edges to traverse from some matching set        
Docker
    image
    container
    build
Webpack
    build
    externals
Restify
    caching
    gzip
    routes
Redux
    single application state
    state objects are immutable
    best practices
    actions
        only way to tell app to change state
            don't confuse "change what app uses as state" with "change state object"
        async
React
    rendering
    component
        Higher-order
        ES6 vs ES5
    best practices
        Top-heavy state
    async

This mindmap communicates that your app uses GraphQL, React, Redux, Webpack, Restify, Docker, plus relevant facts that you want people to understand under each technology.

Then in package.json you can use the CLI

{

    ...
    "scripts": {
        "stackdoc": "eyedact what-you-should-know"
    }
}

# Search for all caching, async topics (GraphQL+Restify+React+Redux)
$ npm run stackdoc caching async -a

# List first match for container (Docker)
$ npm run stackdoc caching -l

This is a quick alternative to writing long documents with manually inserted links to other manuals. All web searches will be in the context of what you need people to know.

Use STDIN if you want to use a shared mindmap across multiple projects, such as from PasteBin as shown above.

Node API

const eyedact = require('eyedact');

const readablestream = eyedact({
    haystack: '/path/to/mindmap',
    needles: ['searchstring'],

    // Search for all matches if true, otherwise only the first match.
    openall: false,

    // If true, use "I'm Feeling Lucky"
    lucky: true,
});