Szymon Kaliski — Cartographist
For more context about the project, you can check out the longer write-up below, which originally appeared as a part of Q4 2021 newsletter.
During the summer of 2020 I played around with an idea for research-focused web browser, embodying some of the concepts from Browsing vs Searching note — browsing being an open-ended divergent activity, and searching understood as information retrieval.
I shared a preview on Twitter ↗ , to a surprisingly overwhelming response, but I got distracted with other things and never got back to the project. I still occasionally get requests for sharing this, so here it is: szymonkaliski/Cartographist ↗ .
The main idea of browsing in panes was inspired by Andy Matuschak's website layout ↗ and some of Nate Parrot's ↗ experiments around stacking mobile web browser views next to each other (which I can't seem to find anymore, sorry). This sort of layout has a long history, starting with Miller columns ↗ and the original Smalltalk class browser, and is a great interface for detail-in-context browsing.
As an aside, I also use this technique for navigating code with Vim, where a single shortcut goes to a definition of a function in a new pane:
