Using Tinderbox

A significant comment from Tinderbox backstage:

I don’t know if this is relevant or not, but my own case of adopting Tinderbox as one of the three main apps I now use for my reference-heavy and interlinked writing on the history of medicine started with dissatisfaction with mind-maps that had crap connected note possibilities. Even now Simplemind (apparently coming back into fashion) does not allow any choice at all of the placement of the ‘text pane’ associated with each map node. And in Obsidian (and the new Octarine) it is still not possible to scroll through a notes list in the left pane and see the text in the right pane. Just this kind of ease has made Tinderbox invaluable to me: a flexible (map) view and text option.

After more than a decade now I’m still happy being a trivial user (quite proud of that badge actually) and my regular use hasn’t really got much more complex: still - every day, I go to Tinderbox to keep my intellectual body and soul (and project sprawls) together and I’d be utterly lost across centuries and texts and disciplines (nothing is more interdisciplinary than the history of medicine) and central concepts (and their rectifications) etc without it.

My learned lesson is that the complex functionality of Tinderbox is, for some like me, quite irrelevant because it does the basic crucial organisational tasks so very well, and so elegantly: so there are uses like mine that have grown very few functional tendrils and do not need to. I know that were I to have my Tinderbox use ‘audited’ by an expert I’m sure they’d fin a thousand ways in which what I do could ‘easily’ be automated or made more efficient - but I don’t care, and I don’t have the time or the learning bandwidth to do so at the moment.

When there are posters on the L&L forum who complain that Scrivener has a steep learning curve, perhaps there needs to be a slightly better signposted account of this basic Tinderbox excellence? — E. P. James