FreeMind is premier free mind-mapping software. The recent development has hopefully turned it into high productivity tool. The operation and navigation of FreeMind is faster than that of MindManager because of one-click “fold / unfold” and “follow link” operations.
Uses of FreeMind
- Keeping track of projects, including subtasks, state of subtasks and time recording
- Project workplace, including links to necessary files, executables, source of information and of course information
- Workplace for internet research using Google and other sources
- Keeping a collection of small or middle sized notes with links on some area which expands as needed. Such a collection of notes is sometimes called knowledge base.
- Essay writing and brainstorming, using colors to show which essays are open, completed, not yet started etc, using size of nodes to indicate size of essays.
- Keeping a small database of something with structure that is either very dynamic or not known in advance. The main disadvantage of such approach when compared to traditional database applications are poor query possibilities. You learn about the structure from the additional data items you enter. For example, different medical records use different structure and you do not have to analyze all the possible structures before you enter the first medical record.
- Commented internet favorites or bookmarks, with colors and fonts having the meaning you want.
Features
- Fully functional following of HTML links stored in the nodes, be it www links or links to local files.
- From very early versions, Freemind supports folding which is its essential property.
- Fast one-click navigation, including folding / unfolding on one click and following links on one click at the same time (you don’t have to make choice between fast following of links and fast fold/unfold). You can move the map by dragging the map’s background as well as using mouse wheel.
- Undo
- Smart Drag’n Drop, including the possibility to copy nodes or copy style of nodes; dragging and dropping of multiple selected nodes; dropping of texts or list of files from outside
- [advt]Smart copying and pasting into, including pasting of links from HTML or structuring the pasted content on the basis of the number of leading spaces in a line; pasting of lists of selected files
- Smart copying and pasting from, including plain text and RTF (MS Wordpad, MS Word, MS Outlook messages).
- Export of map to HTML, with folding
- Find facility, where found items are shown one by one as you do “find next”, and the map is unfolded only for the current item.
- Possibility to use and edit long multiline nodes; even with newlines
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