Overview of the Navigator

This section provides an overview and purpose of the OpenSquiggly navigator use to navigate and view pages.

The Navigator and Your Document Tree

The Navigator pane, located along the left-hand side of OpenSquiggly, is how you will build and organize your document tree.

Each user account has a personalized document tree that they can customize to their own liking. Documents can be arranged in whatever way is most suitable to them. This ability for every user to customize their own document tree is one of the things that makes OpenSquiggly unique in the field of documentation tools.

We presume that each software developer on the team is working on something a little bit different than every other developer, and therefore, the particular documents and source code that they care about at any given moment should be tailored to the bugs, user stories, or other work that they are doing. If you give them a million canned documents from a pre-arranged corporate wiki, they will spend a lot of time sifting through things they don’t care about to get to the documents they do are about.

Other systems allow you to bookmark documents or put them in your favorites list - OpenSquiggly essentially takes this idea to the next level by making bookmarks a first class citizen in the system. For all intents and purposes, your document tree IS a hierarchically arranged set of bookmarks for the documents you care about most. By arranging documents in a personalized way, developers can maximize their personal productivity by minimizing the amount of time they spend getting to the information they need most. Rapid navigation to relevant documentation and source code is a core aim of OpenSquiggly.

You can hide documents that you don’t care about by removing them from your document tree (which you can later recover), move documents around in the tree, copy a reference to a document to multiple places in your tree (which is great for cross referencing multi-dimensional material), add documents, and graft in mounted content from either your personal mount points or the mount points of organizations you care about.

In the rest of this chapter we’ll discuss how to:

  • Add new topic pages to your document tree
  • Add existing topic pages into the document tree
  • Create pages that map to external mount points
  • Move pages to another location in the document tree
  • Copy a reference to a page to another location
  • Hide documents by removing them from the document tree
  • Recover documents by adding them back into the document tree