Introducing Thinking Tools Software
We're building desktop applications that transform plain text into powerful visual models — tools for people who think carefully about complex things.
Why Plain Text?
Most thinking tools trap your ideas inside proprietary formats. Open the file in another application and you get a mess of XML, binary data, or an inscrutable JSON blob. Your ideas belong to you — not to the software vendor’s file format.
Thinking Tools Software is built around a different belief: your data should live in plain text files you can read, edit, search, version control, and back up using any tool you already own. A concept map is just a Markdown file with propositions like “Dog chases Cat” or “Einstein developed General Relativity”. A process model will be a structured text file you can diff in Git, open in VS Code, or grep through on the command line.
This approach forces us to make the text format good enough to stand on its own — which turns out to be a liberating constraint. When the file format is legible, users understand their own data. When it is version-controllable, teachers can share templates with students and get their work back as pull requests. When it is plain text, it works with every editor, every backup tool, and every future application we haven’t imagined yet.
The First Tool: Concepticon
Concepticon is a desktop application for creating, exploring, and teaching with concept maps. You write propositions in plain text — two or more concepts connected by a phrase — and Concepticon turns them into an interactive visual graph.
The design started with a question: what if concept mapping worked the way a thoughtful person with index cards works? You write relationships first, individual concepts emerge from them, and the structure reveals itself through the connections rather than being planned top-down. Concepticon’s proposition format captures exactly this: every edge comes first, every node is derived.
From there, the application adds the things a screen does better than index cards: automatic layout, zoom and pan, AI-assisted generation from documents or web pages, full keyboard navigation, and rich concept descriptions rendered from Markdown.
Concepticon is designed to be accessible by default. I am legally blind, which means screen reader compatibility and keyboard navigation aren’t afterthoughts — they are first-class requirements built into every feature from the start.
What’s Coming
The suite will grow to cover other kinds of structured thinking diagrams. Next will be a process modelling tool based on IDEF0 — a notation developed by the US Air Force for describing complex processes and the data that flows between them. After that, a logic diagram tool for mapping arguments, evidence, and reasoning chains.
All of them will follow the same philosophy: plain text in, rich visuals out, your files always yours.
If this sounds like the kind of tool you’ve been looking for, try Concepticon — and watch this space.