In the screenshot in the repo, there's a node with the text "a mind mapping tool". It has 5 children, but the first child "text-based (terminal application)" is above it. So the more children a node has, the further above it the first child is. What if it was aligned so that the first child is at the same height as its parent? Then it might look more natural like a list, and read easier since the children start at the same height as the parent rather than at some arbitrary point above it.
This would help with flow, because then you can read left to right and scan downwards. Right now you have to keep jumping up to find the first child and then scan down to read all the children.
I agree with this, but I would say that both options work. I like how it organizes things currently, but if this "child list" could be added it would make my workflow quite organized for little input. Keeping things as simple as possible while maintaining productivity is the goal. Although I would like to see color coding in some fashion as to keep larger data sets clear when observed in a tree with many branches.
Perhaps the hotkey of '0' could be used as it is next to O for creating a new "child list". Great tool as-is though.
Please seriously consider making it the default. Every graph-visualization tool makes this alignment mistake, and it's part of why they just aren't very popular. They're too hard to browse because you can't easily scan the graph. I think if you prototype it, you'll see how much better it feels when everything lines up.
This would help with flow, because then you can read left to right and scan downwards. Right now you have to keep jumping up to find the first child and then scan down to read all the children.