I have created my JD system folder structure in MindNode and am wondering how I can import it into Bear app or Obsidian as an index using method 1. So individual notes for every ID. If I have to rewrite everything its painful and copy paste is not much of a time saving,
Also
How do I change my MindNode into a folder structure onto my computer?
You can export from MindNode a couple of ways. All via File > Export To >
Here’s a quick mind map, let’s see what we can do with it.
The first useful thing in the list is File > Export To > Markdown. There are no further options, so Export... and let’s see what we have.
# My system
## 10-19 Life admin
### 11 House
- 11.01
- 11.02
- 11.03
### 12 Finance
### 13 Motor
- 13.01
- 13.02
### 14 Health
### 15 Travel
## 20-29 My hobby
### 21 Research
### 22 Promotion
- 22.01
- 22.02
### 23 Sales
## 30-39 My side-hustle
### 31 Build it
### 32 Ship it
That’s pretty good, and will import in to Bear (just copy/paste it) really nicely. If you’re on the latest version of Bear, those headers can now be folded using the little triangle to their left.
You can also File > Export To > Text > Plain Text. That gives us an indented version of the same.
My system
10-19 Life admin
11 House
11.01
11.02
11.03
12 Finance
13 Motor
13.01
13.02
14 Health
15 Travel
20-29 My hobby
21 Research
22 Promotion
22.01
22.02
23 Sales
30-39 My side-hustle
31 Build it
32 Ship it
Also not bad, but Bear won’t recognise that as anything special. You may prefer this? Put it in a code block?
This is where our friend @SwissArmyWrench comes in. Does johnnybgoode do this? If not, could it?..
Thanks for the ping, Johnny!
Right now, johnnybgoode can’t do this, but there’s no reason it couldn’t! Since I am already planning on building code that would allow you to export in all kinds of formats, such as your own index format you designed, plus JSON, YAML, TOML, etc, there’s no reason I couldn’t also write that code in such a way that it could read in structured data and then recreate the folder structure based on it!
I had never even considered that this would be an option some people want, but now that you mention it, it wouldn’t be a bad idea!
I would be very grateful for this because, Mindnode is excellent at planning folder structure out.
It was painful to place Johnny Decimal index numbers into it manually, But if there is code that would do that also that would be good also.
How good are you with Excel? I’ve just realised the ‘quick ‘n dirty’ way that I would do this.
I’ll type it out, and if you know what I’m on about it’ll make sense. But I can do you a video later if you like as well, just let me know.
So, export-as-plain-text from Markdown. Now you have a file with one line per folder that you want to create. Bring that in to Excel.
Now use your Excel wizardry to build the full path to each of your IDs, like
10-19 Area/11 Category/11.01 ID
…using lookups and CONCAT and so on.
And now just CONCAT your way to a command that will create those folders:
CONCAT("mkdir -p ", cell_containing_folder_path)
The -p tells mkdir to create the full path. So you don’t need to create area & category folders first.
If that’s all voodoo to you just let me know and I’ll put together an example sheet. It’s a bit hacky (it’s heaps hacky) but it works really well for this sort of thing. And I like that you can see exactly what command you’re going to paste in to the terminal vs. running some script and crossing your fingers.
Thank you Johnny!
I think a video will definitely help, lookups are not intuitive for many.
I’m at the library this morning, will knock something together when I get home mid-afternoon.
I have found that pasting the indented structure into Claude or another GPT and asking for a bash command to create the folder structure has worked well for me at least once.
@Kelso Just checking in that you achieved your goal? Let us know if you’re still in need of help.
Thank you, yes that helped and I also have another method from a colleague, which I will share
