Welcome!

HelloMond is a link-based note-taking app. If you:

You are not alone! And I propose that it is not your fault. Links will free you from these concerns, so you can focus on what actually matters: your ideas.

Links are connections between things. We call the "things" nodes, which can be anything. A link has direction—it goes from one node to another. We say that node that a link starts from is a parent node and node that the link goes to is a child node.

In HelloMond, texts are nodes which can be connected to one another. When you hit Enter, it seems simply like you are inserting a new line—not so different from what happens in MS Word or a text editor. However, this simple action creates a text (node) and links to it from a parent node. From here when you hit Tab, you create a new link with the text directly above (which becomes the new parent), and in the process deletes the link from the previous parent.

Links are an alternative approach to folders for navigating your notes. For example, if I have a recipe node, I can create a link with node Cooking using Back links. This creates a Cooking-->recipe link, which allows me to navigate to the recipe from Cooking. In this case Cooking is acting like a "table of contents."

Multiple nodes can link to the same node. This is a powerful result of everything being links! For example, let's say you think of a launch recipe for your fledgling home brewery business. You can start jotting down the idea in your daily journal, and later link it to an existing Launch recipes node. This allows you to view (and edit) it from Launch recipes (which is itself linked to a higher Home brewery node), alongside all the other launch recipes. You can also easily go back to the daily journal entry to see when you thought of the idea and what else you were thinking that day.

Outliner is just a fancy word for nested bullet lists. The name outliner and the omni-presence of the bullet point may seem like it is meant for "outlines" only, or at least that HelloMond heavily prefers that style of note-taking. That isn't the case! You can write long-form style notes in HelloMond, although it admittedly may visually clash. Outliner happens to be a natural and convenient way to display nodes and their links, so HelloMond uses it.

Canvas is a type of node where you can draw rough sketches. Because they're nodes, they can be linked to/from other nodes. This means that you can "embed" a canvas inside an outliner (link from text to canvas), or have text be displayed inside a canvas (link from canvas to text).