midden at a glance

What midden's words mean. Each entry is a line or two and points to the page that goes deeper. For why midden is built the way it is, see Why midden exists.

The words

What you keep

• The heap: everything you've kept in midden. "Asking your heap" means searching it, or asking about it.
• Item: one thing on the heap: a note, a link, a picture, a file, a recording, or a locked card. It's stored once, by the SHA-256 hash of its content, so saving the same thing twice gives you one item, saved twice. The content hash names the item in every browser; local ids don't travel.
• Capture: one act of saving an item: when, how (typed, pasted, dropped, right-click, snagged, snipped, a voice note, shared from the phone, brought in…), and from which page. An item has one capture or more, and they're its timeline.
• Kind: what an item is: text, link, image, file, audio or locked. Each has its own colour.
• Note: what you write about an item. It's shown inside that item and never treated as an item itself.
• Locked card: a stand-in for something in the hoard that you chose to make visible, showing only the label you gave it.
• The hoard: a separate extension for passwords, 2FA secrets, private notes and identity documents, with its own storage and keys. midden never opens it (The hoard).
• Provenance: where something came from: the page, the way it was saved, or for something brought in, where it was kept before ("bookmarked in Dev › Rust · 2021").

What you declare

These are things you said, so midden treats them as facts.

• Tag: a name you put on items (#recipes). Tags are declarations: midden never tags anything on its own. It only offers tags, which you take or turn down.
• Kept together: two items you said belong together, from a card's same-day connections. It goes both ways, and it's listed first among the item's connections.
• Pin: a card you placed on the map yourself. The layout never moves it.
• Reminder: a time to bring an item back to you, which can repeat.
• Trash: hidden everywhere, then deleted for good after 30 days unless you take it back out.
• It's fine: something that might be sensitive that you said isn't, so it's asked about no more (Might be sensitive).
• Markdown note: a note you said shows as markdown, and the boxes you ticked in it, kept beside the note (whose text never changes) (Markdown notes).
• Consolidated card: notes and links under one tag made into one markdown checklist; its capture keeps a copy of each item it was made from (Consolidate).
• Bundle: items of any kind kept together as one card, each whole; while it's there they show only inside it (Consolidate).

What midden works out

These are guesses. The UI shows them as guesses, says why it made each one, and only shows a guess past a measured bar.

• Might be sensitive: an item whose words, address or read text look like a secret, by rules (Might be sensitive). Strong ones mark their card; weak ones wait in review.
• Derivation: anything worked out from an item: its text read from a picture (OCR), its QR codes, a recording's transcript, its extracted text, its vector, its nearest neighbours, its entities. Every derivation is versioned and can be rebuilt.
• Entity: a person, organisation, place, amount or date found in an item's text by rules, plus what kind of thing it is (a quote, bill, receipt or subscription notice). Entities show as square chips under its tags, and search takes @name and $>100.
• Similar: two items midden calls connected. The relevance engine scores the pair from all its evidence (meaning, pictures, people, organisations, the same site) and lists it only past the connection bar, with one reason ("close in meaning", Marcus Aurelius).
• Connections: everything an opened card lists under "connected to", in this order: kept together, similar, same page, shared tags, same day. An item appears once, in the first group that claims it.
• Associated: a tag midden suggests for an item, because items like it carry that tag. You take it or turn it down, and a dismissal is remembered.
• Topic: a patch of the map midden thinks is about one thing. It's named from the words that set it apart, or after a tag most of it shares, and shown in italics. Because topics come from the map layout, they inherit its distortions.
• Relevance engine: what's behind similar, associated tags, search ranking and resurfacing. Each has its own bar.
• The bar: the score a guess must reach to be shown at all, set where about 9 in 10 shown were right. Some bars can be learned on your device from what you open, close, take and dismiss.
• Calibration: how good the guesses really are. Every guess that's shown is recorded with what came of it (wanted, unwanted, or left alone), on this device only, and Diagnostics → Calibration turns that into scores against outcomes.

Ways of looking

• The map (canvas): every item placed so similar things sit close together (by meaning, with tags pulling hardest). It has topics, tag circles, and lenses (Reading the map).

• The list: the same items as cards, arranged one of these ways:

  • flat: newest first;
  • day: by day, like a journal;
  • source: by site, or how it came in;
  • topic: by the map's topics;
  • unseen: what you haven't looked at in a long while;
  • links: one row per link, with the rail for where they came from (Links and where they came from).

  A long note folds on its card, with "more": at 7 lines by default, or 3, or never, as Settings › List says, per device. Opened, it shows whole.

• Card focus: an item opened full size, with its connections and its history.

• History: an item's life, newest first. It merges its captures with its activity log: tagged, noted, kept together, reminded, sent. "Opened" stays on the device.

• Lens: a way of shading the map. Heat shows how well each item matches the search; forgotten shows what you haven't touched.

• Unseen / forgotten: an item with no sign of you in 3 months: not opened, found, noted, tagged or saved again. Settings › List changes how long: 1, 3 or 6 months, or a year, per device; the unseen bands follow it.

• Resurfacing: "goes with this week": forgotten items the relevance engine links to something you saved in the last 7 days. They lead the unseen arrangement.

• Kept coming back to: the topics you saved into most in the last 7 days.

• Search words: #tag, @person, $>100, and where things came from: from:bookmarks, from:midden, in:folder, site:, is:unread, is:unseen, is:twice (Links and where they came from).

Moving things in and out

• Bring in (a dig): bringing in what you kept in another tool (a Pocket export, a browser's bookmarks, or Google Keep's notes) at the time you saved it there, so it arrives as years of layers rather than all today (Bring in).
• Export / a .midden file: everything you keep, in one file you can import anywhere, encrypted under a passphrase you choose (Backup).
• Sync: your browsers kept in step through a hidden app folder in your own Google Drive, encrypted on your device first (Google Drive sync).
• Tombstone: the record a deletion leaves, so it holds across browsers. Without it, the next merge from a browser that still had the item would bring it back.
• Delivery / People: sending items to people you've added. Each person keeps a mailbox in their own Drive, and nobody writes into anyone else's (Delivery between people).