Treemap visualization of an Org Mode file :: Sacha Chua
One of the challenges with digital notes is that it's hard to get a sense of volume, of mass, of accumulation. Especially with Org Mode, everything gets folded away so neatly and I can jump around so readily with C-c j (org-goto) or C-u C-c C-w (org-refile) that I often don't stumble across the sorts of things I might encounter in a physical notebook.
Treemaps are a quick way to visualize hierarchical data using nested rectangles or squares, giving a sense of relative sizes. I was curious about what my main organizer.org file would look like as a treemap, so I wrote some code to transform it into the kind of data that https://github.com/danvk/webtreemap wants as input. webtreemap creates an HTML file that uses Javascript to let me click on nodes to navigate within them.
For this treemap prototype, I used org-map-entries to go over all the headings and make a report with the outline path and the size of the heading. To keep the tree visualization manageable, I excluded done/cancelled tasks and archived headings. I also wanted to exclude some headings from the visualization, like the way my Parenting subheading has lots of personal information underneath it. I added a :notree: tag to indicate that a tree should not be included.
