Mind Maps are one of the most important and valuable tools I use in my working life. I use them every single day. I like mind maps because they:

  • are a great communication tool
    • enable structured communication
      • most important themes as top level concepts
      • elaborate concepts as child nodes
      • aligns very loosely with Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle
      • allows readers to navigate / consume information quickly and efficiently
        • by navigating the hierarchy as deep as they need to to get at the concepts that interest them the most.
    • expressive while being succinct
    • Suit many audiences
      • my future self
      • others
  • help me structure my thinking
    • by providing a framework for me to elaborate my thoughts

There are loads of great Mind Mapping tools out there and I have tried many of them. My tool of choice for Mind Mapping these days is my favourite text editor, Sublime Text.

Wikipedia defines Mind Mapping as a way to visually organise information. Using a bulleted list with indents is a way of visually organising information. I’ve already done it right in this blog post (above in my reasons why I like Mind Maps). I use text based Mind Maps in preference to tool based diagrammatic maps because:

  • I am more productive when creating text based Mind Maps
    • I am not forced to think top down
      • Visual diagram based tools push you towards having to think top down by defining a central topic, then branching off to create sub-topics
        • You don’t have to work this way. You could define nodes ad hoc and move them around
          • In practice it doesn’t work as well for me as the text based approach: I find it stifles my thought patterns because it is not free form.
      • Text based solution allows me to free form brain dump, then easily organise into a hierarchy as patterns start to emerge
    • I can do everything using just a keyboard
      • using the keyboard with shortcuts I am used to because I am a Software Developer and editors are my life!
  • Every computer has the right tool to view/edit them
    • Notepad
    • Emacs
    • TextMate
    • Sublime Text
      • which, if you save your mind map with a .md extensive (MarkDown) does node folding for you (see image below)
    • etc
  • I can easily share them with others
    • Give them my text file
    • Copy/Paste into an email

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I’ve tried MindManager (expensive), FreeMind (free, but lacklustre UI), XMind (free for non-commercial use, great UI), MindMeister (free for limited number of maps, cloud based). Some of these tools are ordinary, some are really good, but I just can’t go past plain old text for the reasons outlined above.