Twig

I have tried most of the thinking tools, and I keep going back to whiteboards. When it has to be online, the choice is a text editor. Nothing to arrange, nothing to style, just the next line and whatever I am trying to figure out. At the office, our notes live in a text editor because it is the quickest place I know to be wrong.

A lot of what I think about can have the shape of a tree, like a flow, a set of screens or a list of decisions. For that, the ASCII tree is the best thing I have found. It tells you what belongs to what, it needs nothing but text, and it reads like a story. I kept wanting a text editor, maybe a VS Code extension, that would draw the ASCII tree while I typed. And that is what Twig is.

Twig is a text-first mind-mapping editor that you can try in the browser. Write an indented outline, and it draws the tree and a map as you type, with links between any two lines, all on one page that works offline and keeps your document in your browser.