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

Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 14, 2012 at 11:02 PM

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>Mind mappers are little more than visually enhanced hierarchical
>outlining tools. As such, they suffer from the “everything is
>miscellaneous” weakness of outlines, i.e. they can’t include the same
>item under different branches. Clones offer a solution to this issue
>but, again, though quite easily found in outliners, I have not seen them
>in ‘standard’ mind mapping applications.

In terms of outlining, a standard mind mapper is even more limited than a standard single-pane outliner, as in a mind-mapper you can have (in fact you are forced to have) only one level-1 item (everything else being level-2 etc.), whilst in an outliner you can have as many level-1 items as you like.

Interestingly mind mappers in this sense are more similar to wikis, as in a wiki you are forced to define a home page (index), which is your single level-1 item - although you are not forced to link everything else to it, as you are in mind mappers.

ConnectedText has a tool to view wiki pages as a mind map, though only those pages will show in the given view that have been connected. In fact I’ve just realised that this feature makes CT a mind-mapper with cloning ability, as discussed in this thread (although it won’t let you reorder the items in the mind-map view: items are displayed in the order of creation or modification, unfortunately).