FREEPLANE

Nick Peers reveals how you can easily manage all of your thoughts – from simple ideas to fully formed projects – with this powerful free tool.

OUR EXPERT

Nick Peers wishes he had used Freeplane to plan this tutorial. This 11th-hour thinking is really starting to wind him up.

M ind-mapping tools are designed to bring order to chaotic thoughts. They can be used for anything from a simple means of jotting down a few random thoughts to full-blown project management. A mind-map is basically a series of interconnected thoughts represented as ‘nodes’, which can be placed anywhere on-screen and either left unconnected or joined to others in a hierarchy defined using styles and connecting lines, with a single oval-shaped ‘root’ at its centre indicating the mindmap’s subject.

Freeplane does all this, of course, and more – it’s almost infinitely customisable and you can style things manually or use an automatic system to indicate what level in your chosen hierarchy items sit. Nodes can contain all kinds of information, represented by text, icon, image, hyperlink or scientific formula or calculation. You can customise your view on the fly as you see fit, and even assign tasks using deadlines and reminders to get them done.

The anatomy of a node

1  Title

Each node has its own title – double-click this to edit it or right-click it to format it via the Apply style section.

2  Icon

Choose View>Controls>Icons toolbar’, then click an icon on the toolbar to add it to the node.

3  Details

This description appears beneath the node. Use the ^ button to its left to hide/show it.

4  Notes

Once added, roll your mouse over the notes icon to reveal the note as a pop-up.

5  Image

Select a node and choose Insert>Image> Add image… – resize it by clicking and dragging its bottom right-hand corner.

6  Attributes

Attributes work in a similar way to fields in a database, enabling you to attach specific characteristics to individual nodes.

If all this sounds overwhelming, don’t worry – once installed, Freeplane opens with its own example mindmap in place to show you what it can do. Let’s crack on and get it set up. The app is written in Java, which means you’ll need to install a Java runtime to access it. Simply open the Terminal and type the following: 

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install openjdk-8-jre

Once installed, head over to https://sourceforge. net/projects/freeplane/files/freeplane stable to download the latest stable version (1.8.10 at time of writing) as a .deb file. Versions can be found in Ubuntu Software Centre, but even the updated Snap version is way out of date. Instead, double-click the .deb file and follow the prompts – once installed, Freeplane can be opened using the App Launcher.