Map Your Mind with FreeMind

In the old days, if you wanted to brainstorm your ideas — and, more importantly, the connections between those ideas — you ended up with huge sheets of paper taped to walls and covered in text, circles, and arrows. Nowadays, you can use software for such tasks, software that enables you to get thoughts down “on screen”, and then connect and organize those ideas in logical, useful ways. The resulting diagram is generally known as a mindmap (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindmap for more info).

In the Windows world, the best tool for mindmapping is probably MindManager. It’s nice software, but it’s closed and proprietary, inextricably linked with Windows and Microsoft Office, and costs several hundred dollars. Forget that! There’s a great, free (as in speech and beer) alternative, with open formats, and available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It’s called FreeMind.

You can get FreeMind at http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page. There are binaries for Debian and SUSE, but if you look around, you can probably find a pre-built binary for your favorite distribution. FreeMind requires Java, so you need to have a working Java Runtime Environment(JRE) on your box. The FreeMind web site provides links to working JRE’s as well, a nice touch.

After installing FreeMind, enter freemind on the command-line to open it. You start with a central node representing the overall topic you’re going to map….

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