What Noodle Isn't
Currently noodle only implements undirected links between nodes. This will not change any time soon. Consider creating a flowchart in another format such as graphml or odg.
Noodle integrates with conventional filesystems. But moving files around isn’t the main purpose of noodle. Noodle’s relationship with the filesystem is incidental. Noodle is all about this abstract space of parallel worlds, the layers. But there is a necessary pragmatism that requires all that floatiness to be concretely represented somhow in computer memory. The filesystem is a ubiquitous structure which is understood and manipulable by humans. Importantly, it offers a kind of canonical mapping of the noodle space of ideas onto a digital storage medium. This is a historical accident rather than an intentional aspect of noodle. Many mobile users nowadays don’t think of filesystems as something that organizes an entire computer system. It’s something they use at their job to organize shared drives or cloud drives. Perhaps paradoxically, noodle may actually be thought of as a filesystem (as opposed to a file manager). It would be interesting to see what kind of performance improvements we would see by bringing noodle to a lower level of implementation. It’s outside the scope of the project for now.
There are better tools for describing systems. Again we don’t have directed links which poses a problem for that use-case. Another thing is that the meaning of noodle’s layers is expected to shift naturally over time as the user elaborates their structure. If you want to have a layer dedicated to a certain role, like “parameters” or “transfer functions” or “transducer”… starts to create a lot of overhead. If you don’t have a dedicated tool that interfaces with noodle to maintain your abstraction layers, it’s just going to be a lot of work. You’d likely be better off choosing a dedicated tool in the first place.
However, if you’re willing to implement an extension or dedicated plugin to noodle, it could get interesting. I could totally see noodle serving any one of the above purposes with dedicated extensions. Another use case that would be VERY useful to me personally is converting noodle structure into icalendar task schedules so I can gauge the feasibility of my crazy ideas.