Mercator

This is ANCIENT code and probably does not work with any current version of tcl. You are welcome to download it of course but no guarantees of functionality

Mercator which is currently in an alpha state is a program intended to help you create what are often described as "mindmaps". There are numerous commercially available programs to do this, such as:

I have no reason to suppose that these are other than excellent programs (I have not used them), but they all suffer from one or more of the following problems:

  • They are single platform - usually Windows
  • They are relatively expensive
  • They use proprietary, closed data storage formats
  • They are not extensible

The objectives (or are they aims?) of Mercator are:

  • to be free for non-commercial use and have its source freely available
  • to run on all common platforms
  • to use an open data storage format, currently XML based
  • to be extensible

Gosh, it aims to solve all the problems identified above! What a surprise.


The present version of Mercator is written in tcl/tk which will come as no surprise to people who know me. So in order to run the prototype you will need tcl/tk version 8.0.4 for your platform. I do not preclude producing versions of mercator in other languages in the future should this be necessary. You can get the source of Mercator by ftp :

To install, on *IX systems, run the program installMercator, on Windows double click on the winstall.tcl program. On Macs you need to do a bit more (easy) work until I get a proper Mac release done - if you want to know how mail me.


I have set up a mailing list on the egroups system for people interested in Mercator. You can join by sending mail to mercator-subscribe@egroups.com or by filling in this form:

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