Amen. Please don’t read my last post as being in opposition to this. My point was simply enlightened self-interest. At some point a map may be very large - and the answer might be to use a bigger monitor as opposed to a different view.
I also totally accord with @eastgate’s point about multiple views. It is easy to ‘live’ in one view, cutting oneself of from other useful perspectives on your notes.
At which point I should give a shout out for Attribute Browser view, not yet mentioned. AB view saves what previously used a log of action code and/or agents when you quickly want to see for instance, what are all the discrete $Tags values, how many are there of each, and which notes use them. I now use this a lot. (Kudos to @JFallows who originally suggested the feature).
I endorse this most strongly. There are plenty of tools to work with hierarchies - pretty much any outliner or any mind-mapper will do a good job. If you know that your data is hierarchical, fine. But some serious problems of organising information are caused by trying to wrestle into a hierarchy when that’s not how it’s associated.
TB is the only tool I know that allows the structure and relationships to emerge as you go - and I’m speaking as someone who still only works with the tip of the TB iceberg.
A slightly modified version of these excellent suggestions would be very useful as a “getting started” note that is delivered with every new Tinderbox purchase.
Much of nature is not nested (look at the fungal networks that underpin the forest), human communication, however, does tend to be a serialisation of nested structures. (It’s a more or less optimally efficient solution to the problem of building complex cognitive structures from (and for) tiny primate working memories).
The building of these complex structures inevitably has a kind of diastolic and systolic rhythm to it – alternating chaotic (but creative) splurge with as much pruning and nesting as there is energy, time and communicative pressure for.
The trick is really to build some fluidity and capacity in moving back and forth between unconstrained chaos and rigorous summary of its harvests. (between thought-provoking tangled maps, and publishable outlines).
(There’s no forest without the fungus, and the fungus ain’t much unless it yields a forest).