Freemind's Underrated/Underreported New Feature for Non-Followers

Posted by Foolness
Dec 14, 2012 at 07:10 PM

There’s a recent rant thread (http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/4635/) looking for a clone feature and the FreeMind page as of this visit:

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/FreeMind_1.0.0:_The_New_Features

Clones: nodes and its sub-nodes can be cloned. The two copies will then be synchronized
Collaboration: two or more people can work simultaneously on the same map
Restore complete session
Location based mindmapping
Spell checking on input

I didn’t post there for three reasons.

1) Freemind doesn’t have all the features the author requested and it’s still a mindmap though I’ve always personally categorized fishbone software as pane outliners disguising themselves as mindmaps.

2) Freemind is still clunky and is not my recommended mapper compared to Compendium. (Even for the rant thread, if he had been looking for a mapper instead of an outliner, I thought Compendium especially the old version had better seamless drag and drop pics and url icon handling for the Windows version.) I just happened to recently found an outline template that is structured exactly on two axis and fishboning seemed like the perfect excuse to retest Freemind.

3) I didn’t actually download the new version and it was the old version of Freemind that had new features I didn’t thought Freemind had. It was just coincidence that the topic was there. I was planning to make a new thread here about Freemind because the feature is hidden in places where, unless you reread the help files, you’d missed it.

The (old) new features are:

>An entry has a RTF style field now. In short, Freemind has caught up with other fishbone software and it’s still the only one on the desktop that’s free, cross-platform and popular.

Here’s the tricky thing. There’s actually “three” types of text field now. If you just press insert, Freemind still thinks it’s a basic no format text field. Only when you type and edit a long sentence inside the field do you get the second field which is just a pop-up text box with no formatting but makes for easier editing of the words much like Compendium’s default text field.

The third format box ONLY appears if you highlight the text and press “ALT+ENTER”. The program asks if you want formatting (and will continue to ask if you don’t remember the decision) and only then will Freemind show an editor with bold, italic, underline and a way to insert tables.

>Freemind has drag and drop

This one I don’t know how old the feature is but I’ve only discovered that you can drag the nodes like an actual nodes and it’s no longer just a fishbone line. Maybe it was always there but I just didn’t notice because the way the program registers that area, you have to highlight the right side of your text field in order to find a small oval besides your text. Holding the left mouse button while that oval is clicked (it turns red) allows free form dragging. Not that it’s much use but it does reduce most of the wasted space a fishbone software tends to create.

>Freemind has filters

In the left side of the toolbar where the zoom is, there’s a funnel. Click that and now you can insert words that filters out your maps which basically allows a reverse style of PersonalBrain where you no longer have to always find for the words and then find next for the words. The filter saves the word in a file so it’s clunky for one time filters but it’s kinda sorta allows Freemind to have tags now and makes Freemind a truer free alternative to PersonalBrain’s feature where before there was none. I still prefer Compendium’s folder structure but at least mapping innovations are moving on again in the free arena and it’s moving in ways that are different from outliner innovations.