Mind Map

The mind map is a force-directed graph that renders your ideas as nodes and their relations as edges. It gives you a bird’s-eye view of how your thinking connects and evolves.

Caution

The mind map is a Pro feature. Free-tier users can explore relations via the CLI and API but do not have access to the visual graph in the web app.

How It Looks

The map renders on a dark canvas with a dot grid background. Nodes are rounded cards colored by status, and edges are styled by relation type. Highly-connected ideas glow and appear larger, making hubs easy to spot.

A project ecosystem — ideas connected by blocks, inspires, and related relations.

Visual Language

The map uses a consistent visual language so you can read relationships at a glance.

Node Status Colors

Captured

Exploring

Building

Shipped

Shelved

Edge Relation Types

Related

Parent → Child

Blocks

Inspires

Duplicate

Supersedes

Node Anatomy

Each node is a card showing:

• Title — the idea name (truncated if long)
• Status dot — colored circle in the top-right corner
• Tags — up to 2 tag pills shown below the title
• Connection count — badge in the bottom-right showing how many relations exist

Node width scales with connection count — ideas with more relations appear larger, making hub ideas easy to spot. Ideas with 3+ connections also get a subtle glow effect matching their status color.

Node sizing — highly-connected ideas are larger and glow.

Edge Types

Edges encode the relation type through color, weight, and style:

Relation	Color	Style	Arrow	Meaning
related	Purple	Thin solid	No	General connection
parent	Light	Solid, bold	Yes	Hierarchical parent → child
blocks	Red	Solid, bold	Yes	A blocks progress on B
inspires	Cyan	Solid, medium	Yes	A inspired the creation of B
duplicate	Amber	Dashed	No	Auto-detected duplicate
supersedes	Gray	Dashed	Yes	A replaces B

Auto-created edges (from duplicate detection) have a score showing similarity percentage. Manually created edges have score: null.

Edge types — blocks (red), inspires (cyan), related (purple), duplicate (amber dashed).

Interaction

Action	How
Zoom	Scroll wheel or pinch gesture
Pan	Click and drag on the background
Open idea	Click a node to open the idea detail panel
Highlight connections	Hover a node to highlight its direct connections
Drag-to-connect	Drag from a node handle to another node to create a relation
Context menu	Right-click a node for quick actions (move status, link, focus, archive)
Focus mode	Right-click → Focus to dim everything except the 2-hop neighborhood
Filter by status	Status toggles above the graph show/hide ideas by status
Filter by tag	Tag filter narrows the graph to ideas with specific tags
Timeline	Adjustable time window with a brushable density chart showing idea creation frequency. Drag the beginning and end handles to set the visible range, use preset chips (1d, 7d, 30d, All) for quick navigation, or press play to sweep a playhead through the window. Keyboard shortcuts: Space for play/pause, Home to reset, Arrow keys to pan.

Focus Mode

Right-click any node and select Focus to highlight its 2-hop neighborhood. All other nodes dim to 20% opacity, letting you trace the immediate context of an idea without visual clutter.

Drag-to-Connect

Hover a node to reveal four connection handles. Drag from a handle to another node to create a new relation. A magnetic snap activates within 15px of the target, and a relation type picker appears on drop.

API Access

Retrieve the full graph data to build custom visualizations.

curl https://neuralrepo.com/api/v1/map \
  -H "X-API-Key: nrp_your_key_here"

Response:

{
  "nodes": [
    {
      "id": 42,
      "title": "Background job processing system",
      "status": "building",
      "tags": ["backend", "infrastructure"],
      "connectionCount": 5,
      "created_at": "2026-03-15T10:00:00Z"
    }
  ],
  "edges": [
    {
      "id": 1,
      "source": 10,
      "target": 42,
      "type": "blocks",
      "score": null,
      "note": "Need auth system before dashboard",
      "created_at": "2026-03-16T09:30:00Z"
    }
  ]
}

CLI Exploration

Use nrepo graph to explore the graph from any idea without opening the web app.

# Immediate connections
nrepo graph 42

# 3 levels deep, filtered to blocks and inspires
nrepo graph 42 --depth 3 --type blocks,inspires

42: Background job processing system [building]
 ├── blocks → 55: Admin dashboard [exploring]
 ├── blocks → 60: API rate limiting [captured]
 └── inspires → 71: Event-driven architecture [exploring]
      └── inspires → 82: Real-time notifications [captured]

Tip

Use nrepo graph with --depth 1 for a quick overview, or increase the depth to trace chains of influence and dependency across your idea network.

3D Mind Map

Toggle the 3D button in the toolbar to switch from the flat force-directed layout to an immersive three-dimensional view.

The 3D view is powered by Three.js and 3d-force-graph. It uses the same graph data as the 2D view with a few visual differences:

• Node labels — rendered as CSS2D overlays (always face the camera)
• Weak edges (related, duplicate) — rendered as directional particle streams instead of dashes (3d-force-graph does not support dashed links)
• Strong edges (parent, blocks, inspires, supersedes) — rendered as solid lines with directional arrows
• Camera — orbit with drag, zoom with scroll, pan with right-drag; auto-fits on load

Clicking a node in 3D works the same as in 2D — opens the idea detail panel. Right-click opens the context menu.

Performance Note

The 3D view runs on WebGL. Very large graphs (500+ nodes) may be slower to navigate than the 2D view on lower-end hardware.

Force Controls

The toolbar includes force sliders to tune the physics simulation in real time. Open the force controls panel from the toolbar to access:

Control	Effect
Link strength	How strongly connected ideas pull toward each other
Node strength	How strongly ideas repel each other (charge)
Friction	How quickly the simulation settles (velocity decay)
Reheat	Click to re-run the simulation from current positions

Changes take effect immediately. The Reheat button applies a burst of simulation energy (alpha = 0.3) so ideas settle into a new arrangement after you adjust sliders.

You can save custom force configurations as presets and switch between them from the toolbar dropdown. Presets are stored in localStorage.

Agent Chat Panel

The floating AI agent chat panel hovers over the mind map. Click the NeuralRepo icon in the bottom-right corner of the map to open it.

The panel is draggable — grab the header to reposition it anywhere on the map. Its position is saved to localStorage per session.

Model Selector

A model selector appears at the top of the panel. Available models depend on your BYOK configuration:

• Anthropic models (Sonnet, Haiku, Opus) — require a BYOK Anthropic key
• Workers AI models (Qwen 30B, Llama 70B, GPT-OSS 120B, Mistral Small 24B) — no key required

Your selected model is remembered across sessions.

Streaming & Thinking

Responses stream token-by-token over a WebSocket connection. A collapsible “Thought process” block appears above the response text when extended thinking is active — click it to expand and read the model’s reasoning.

Tool Results

Tool calls render as collapsible ToolResultCards in the message thread. Each card shows:

• A summary line (e.g., “Found 5 ideas for ‘machine learning’”)
• Expandable detail content
• Clickable idea chips — click a chip to highlight that node on the map and scroll it into view

Graph-mutating tool calls (creating ideas, creating connections, semantic layout) animate directly onto the map. See Artifacts for full details.

Selection Context

When you have nodes selected on the map, the agent automatically receives the selected idea IDs and titles as additional context. This lets you say things like “summarize these” or “connect these ideas” without specifying them by name.

Undo

The panel header shows an undo button when there are reversible agent actions in the current session. Clicking undo reverses the last mutation: deletes created ideas, removes created relations, or restores layout positions.

Performance

The mind map uses two rendering modes depending on graph size:

• SVG rendering (up to 200 nodes) — full interactivity, crisp at any zoom level
• Canvas rendering (200+ nodes) — optimized for large graphs, device-pixel-ratio aware

The force simulation uses D3.js with tuned physics: charge repulsion scales with a density slider, link distance is 120px, and ideas with the same first tag weakly cluster together.