Home topic

I created a new topic, but cannot get rid of it!

"I want to remove it from the screen (delete it completely) but it says it is a "Home" topic and now it has a life of its own. What to do?"

The Home Topic cannot be deleted for reasons explained in a moment but it can be renamed, and others can be merged into it. That effectively allows you to get rid of it.

Let's say you have just made a new Topicscape called My Reference. You have a folder called "My Reference Stuff" with many sub-folders, and you dragged that folder to the first topic of your new Topicscape. It makes a subtopic of the home topic called My Reference Stuff with many subtopics under that. Then you might well want to get rid of the Home Topic. Make a temporary subtopic of My Reference called Temp. Make this the Current Topic by double left clicking on it. Click on the topic My Reference Stuff and drag the green do to My Reference and release. Select the merge option.

A better solution would be to avoid that Home topic in the first place by opening any Topicscape and then using the import function to import My Reference Stuff to make a new Topicscape. My Reference Stuff will then be the Home topic of the new Topicscape.

What is the significance of the Home topic?

You may think this is all unnecessarily complicated, but the reason the home topic cannot be deleted is that it acts as a reference point in determining what is an island topic (isolated topic) or group of topics. If a topic is connected to the Home topic by a chain of associations (no matter how long) it is not an island topic. We wanted to avoid the situation where topics could not be reached by navigation or exploration. Such isolated topics, as soon as any connection with the Home topic is broken, are moved under Topicscape Islands.