WriteMapper 4 is out for Mac and Windows

Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 13, 2023 at 12:07 PM

It’s an easy app to underestimate – the improved mindmapping options alone are interesting, and the full Document View (which is also editable) is extremely useful.

There are niggles: you can’t select multiple nodes, for instance, which means you have to move/copy/delete mindmap nodes individually. The same applies in Document View – you can only select the contents of one node at a time, you can’t select text across multiple nodes.

I’ve suggested the following to the developer (Guan):

1) Smart punctuation! (By which I mean, curly apostrophes, quotation marks etc.)

2) A search and replace function would be very nice! (Not least to resolve the smart punctuation issue noted above)

3) It would be great if one could emulate Ulysses, Scrivener etc. by viewing a selected node plus subnodes in the mindmap as a contiguous document, rather than having to view the entire document in one go. To explain further: the “Document View” is great, but if you could select a node (e.g. “Tune your setup” in your help file) and then view that node plus all its subnodes in, as it were, a “sub-Document View”, that would be extremely helpful, especially when dealing with very large documents.

4) Similarly, it would be great if one could select multiple nodes in the mindmap using e.g. Cmd (or Ctrl in Windows)/Shift + click. And then move, delete, copy them all together, rather than one by one.

5) A small extra suggestion: why not put a magnifying glass icon in the toolbar for Quick Search (eventually maybe for Quick Search & Replace)? Just for the sake of completeness ;-)

The price is fairly robust, but not bad compared to many other writing apps. I’d agree that Scrivener is a better bargain (and also much more powerful), but I like the WriteMapper model, I must say. I also like the broad range of export options, although the results aren’t always exactly elegant.