Szymon Kaliski – Cartographer

Cartographist is an experimental web browser optimized for rabbit holes.

• Instead of opening new windows (with cmd-click), Cartographer spawns horizontally scrollable panels.
• Instead of forcing you to find things in a linear history, Cartographist shows a tree-structured overview of your browsing:
  
• Instead of always starting over, Cartographist can save and load ‘trails’ (the exact state of the session you left), to support researching topics over longer periods of time.

For more context on the project, check out the longer article below, which originally appeared as part of Q4 2021 newsletter.

During the summer of 2020, I toyed with an idea for a research-oriented web browser, which explored some concepts Browsing vs. Search remark – browsing be a diverse, open-ended activity, and to search conceived as information retrieval.

I shared a sneak peek on Twitter ↗to a surprisingly overwhelming response, but I got distracted by other things and never returned to the project. I still get occasional requests to share this, so here it is: szymonkaliski/cartographer ↗.

The main idea of ​​browsing panels is inspired by The layout of Andy Matuschak’s website ↗ and some of By Nate Parrot ↗ experiments around stacking mobile web browser views side by side (which I can’t find anymore, sorry). This type of layout has a long history, starting with Miller columns ↗ and the original Smalltalk class browser, and is a great interface for browsing details in context.

As a side note, I also use this technique for navigating code with Vim, where a single shortcut goes to a definition of a function in a new window:

(Glamorous toolbox ↗ is worth a look as it takes the idea of ​​window browsing to another level)

In theory, I also really like the idea of ​​a disk-persistent history, which allows you to go back to a browser session after a while and consciously decide which “topic” I’m on.

Unfortunately, I don’t think having the full history is that useful in practice. Yes, it’s sometimes good to know how you got somewhere, but I think the most valuable part of ‘research’ is the synthesis part: taking parts of larger wholes, rearranging them, recombining them, thinking with the material. A small step in this direction could be to hold the scroll position or perhaps selection, and make the history editable – allowing users to remove dead ends, add notes, etc.

Plus, I started to feel like I was solving this problem at the wrong level. For example, a good window manager could almost completely replace Cartographist – I played with the column layout HHTWM for a while, but the lack of horizontal scrolling ultimately makes it not that useful.

Let me know if you have any ideas to make Cartographist better! Is there something interesting here that I’m not seeing? Could it be useful to you in some way?

Code is open source: szymonkaliski/cartographer ↗.

1. 03-01-2022A Dog, A Short Walk on “Programming”, MIDI → CV and a Rabbit-Holing Web Browser³