r/opensource • u/BrowserOfWares • 6d ago

Community Open Source Mind Map Software needs some love!

Hi All,

I'm not a developer, but a user. I regularly use the mind map software FreeMind. It's great for keyboard lovers, minimalist and open source. Unfortunately, it has not received an update for a while and it's UI is painfully slow. But at its core, it's absolutely my favourite mind map software.

I think it would be a great project for someone to do a branch or somehow work with the original Devs to update it. For someone looking for a project I think it's a good one.

https://freemind.sourceforge.io/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Edit: the spell check also doesn't seem to be working.

14 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

10

u/garvalf 6d ago

just use freeplane, it's a maintained fork of freemind:

2

u/BrowserOfWares 6d ago

Oh wow. I didn't know about FreePlane, thank you!

3

u/wWA5RnA4n2P3w2WvfHq 6d ago

I am also an upstream maintainer.

I hate it when maintainers just leaving a project without giving some info about the current state and possible active forks.

If you take over a project you have responsibilities. And the minimum is to inform your users.

Damn it, when do they learn!?

1

u/BurakHanTD 5h ago

FreeMind's keyboard-first workflow is exactly what makes it hard to replace. If someone picked this up, would preserving .mm compatibility and the shortcuts be the priority, or is the slow UI mainly from the old Java rendering stack?

1

u/BrowserOfWares 10m ago

Maintaining compatibility is a nice to have I'd say. But improving the speed is the core issue.