This is a hierarchical planning/documentation tool.
This is designed to aid with breaking a problem/subject down into smaller, more manageable pieces, and re-order/re-write them as necessary.
It allows you to go into detail and maintain an overview (it's all too easy to get lost in the details and lose sight of the main point).
You need to have the Curses perl-module installed to get this to work (download it from CPAN (www.cpan.org)).
You'll probably use it in one of three ways:
- As a planning tool. You can add things to the tree as you think of them, re-arrange them as necessary break down large tasks into subtasks (without losing sight of the large task). In this usage you may or may not feel it necessary to edit the contents of the nodes, but you could use the structure you build to produce a document of the plan, by adding short descriptions to the contents of each node.
- As a documentation tool. You can start with the subject of the document, recursively breaking down larger sections as you think of more detail you can add to them.
- As a programming tool. I've not used it for this myself, but it could make it easier to break a program down into subroutines and loops, producing source-code files as output. I suspect that most people will find existing programming tools more useful.
This is designed to be simple and flexible, with an (as far as anything is) intuitive interface. Currently this is just a perl script using the perl Curses module for the interface.
Using hpt:
hpt <filename>
If the file specified (filename) exists hpt attempts to read in the file. If the file does not exist it creates a new project, but does not create the file until you actually save the project (F10).
As an example, open projectDoc.hpt with hpt ("hpt projectDoc.hpt") which should be with this distribution. It was used to produce the documentation for this project (README, HISTORY, TODO).
- Instructions
Move around (and collapse and expand parts of) the tree using the arrow keys or the standard vi editor hjkl keys.
Move items around in the tree using Shift and H, J, K and L.
Create new nodes by Inserting them after the currently selected node (Insert key) or press Tab to create a new one at the current position (this isn't a very clear description, it actually creates the new node and puts the currently selected node and everything below it under this one, try it, you'll see what it does).
Change the View mode by pressing F2.
Change the title of the current node by being in 'Normal' View mode (as displayed at the bottom of the screen) and pressing t.
Change the file you want the current node output to by changing the View mode to 'Output files' and pressing t. The output file is the file that this node will be a part of (for example see the projectDoc.hpt tree, the README file is made up of a number of different nodes, each node is added in the order they appear down the tree).
If a node has no output file specified it will not be output.
To save the current tree to your hpt file, press F10.
To produce the output files, press F3.