For comparison, below is the old splash screen. Though cute, it is (to my eye, anyway) less than aesthetically pleasing and looks out of place on my Mac.
Type a few letters to filter the list of icons (useful when you have a lot of icons). You can also use the arrow keys to navigate / select an icon, and then press Enter to apply the selected icon.
The icons that show up in the macOS menu bug me (enormously) and I haven’t found configuration-based a way to disable them. Thus I have disabled them in the relevant menu code.
Shown below is the Freeplane menu with icons (the default):
Shown below is the Freeplane menu with icons removed (the way I prefer them):
The out of the box Freeplane build produces the following when run in dark mode on macOS (note the title-bar color):
This is been fixed to appear as follows:
In the base Freeplane, the combination of Format > Copy format and Format > Paste format doesn’t include the size of icons in the formatting that is transferred from one node to another. This is fixed—though I haven’t been unable to understand the undo-model (yet)—and as a result the icon size part of Format > Paste format is not undoable. I will look into how to correctly invoke the “icon-size transferring” logic inside the undo manager at some point (though it isn’t a high priority, for me, at least).
I had endless trouble getting a working build environment on macOS Catalina. Turns out the build is super-sensitive to particular JDK and Gradle versions.
What eventually worked for me was the following:
export JAVA_HOME=~/Apps/mac/jdk-14.0.1.jdk/Contents/Home
export GRADLE_BIN=~/Apps/mac/gradle-6.5.1/bin
export PATH=${GRADLE_BIN}:${JAVA_HOME}/bin:${PATH}
The above is codified into setupPaths.sh which is called by the added macDist.sh script. Obviously you will need to update the paths in setupPaths.sh to match your local environment.
Once done, to build you should (hopefully) be able to run ./macDist.sh from the top-level folder (on either 1.8.x or 1.8.x_sr branch) and wait for the resulting DMG to pop open in Finder.
If you run into build failures due to test failures in either MenuBuildProcessFactoryTest or JMenuItemBuilderTest, or have other Gradle weirdness with freeplane_debughelper, run ./fixupBrokenBuild.sh which will comment out the offending tests and remove freeplane_debughelper from the list of Gradle targets. freeplane_debughelper is only needed for debugging Freeplane (though I managed to work around the lack of freeplane_debughelper... contact me if you want help).
For those who might be interested, I have created a Freeplane mindmap template that matches macOS’s dark mode.
The file <FREEPLANE_ROOT>/artwork/templates/_Freeplane.StyleMaster.Dark.mm contains all of the styles needed to render the mindmap shown above. To apply, copy _Freeplane.StyleMaster.Dark.mm to your local system somewhere, and then in Freeplane select Format > Manage styles > Apply map styles from..., select _Freeplane.StyleMaster.Dark.mm (from whichever path you copied it to), and then press Ok.
Not sure how many folks this will interest, but I find Keyboard Maestro (KM) indispensable and have a KM macro set up so that ⌃+S shows the following macro palette, allowing single-key application of relevant styles:
If you are interested in the KM macros, feel free to contact me.
As with the splash screen, the “out of the box” icons provided with Freeplane aren’t to my liking. In <FREEPLANE_ROOT>/artwork/icons/replacementIcons there are many alternative icons (of which a growing number are scalable vector graphics (SVGs)) which look good on a high-DPI Retina iMac or MacBook display.
To install icons, copy the contents of <FREEPLANE_ROOT>/artwork/icons/replacementIcons into <USER_DIRECTORY>/icons.
To open the Freeplane <USER_DIRECTORY> folder, in Freeplane,
select Tools > Open user directory.
NOTE: Be sure to back up your existing icons if you are partial to them.
Currently conditionally applied styles cannot use regular expressions to match hyperlinks attached to mindmap nodes. A few years ago (when my knowledge of Freemind, now Freeplane) was more limited than it is today, I hacked together a regex-based approach to automatically “decorate” nodes based on the nodes’ hyperlinks.
In order to set this up, copy <FREEPLANE_ROOT>/artwork/icons/linkDecoration.ini into your Freeplane <USER_DIRECTORY> folder.
linkDecoration.ini is a plain-text file with a fairly simple syntax, as follows:
{REGEX} | ICON_NAME
For example:
{^accord://} | Accordance
{^bear://x-callback-url/open-note} | Bear_Logo_app_red_note_notes
{^git} | git_server_computer_version_source_control.svg
{^http:} | world_web_globe-v2-16x16 # 0 0 255
{^https://} | world_web_globe-v2-16x16_secure_ssl
{^marginnote3app://} | MarginNote_app_logo_mindmap_document_blue_deepwork # 0 0 255
{^things://} | Things
{^x-devonthink-item://} | devonthink_research_library_archive_notes # 0 0 255
{^x-devonthink://search} | devonthink_research_library_archive_notes_search # 0 0 255
{^\.\./.*/$} | folder
{^\./.*/$} | folder
{^tel:} | telephone
...
# Suffix-based rules (type-based)
{\.accord$} | Accordance
{\.bat$} | file_batch
{\.cmd$} | file_batch
{\.csv$} | file_csv
{\.DOC$} | file_ms_word
{\.doc$} | file_ms_word
{\.DOCX$} | file_ms_word
{\.docx$} | file_ms_word
{\.eml$} | email
{\.EPUB$} | ePub
{\.epub$} | ePub
...
Freeplane is a free and open source software application that supports thinking, sharing information and getting things done at work, in school and at home. The core of the software is tools for mind mapping (also known as concept mapping or information mapping) and using mapped information. Freeplane is written in Java using OSGi and Java Swing. It runs on any operating system that has a current version of Java installed. It can be run locally or portably from removable storage like a USB drive.
We use github only as the main code repository, all other project parts are hosted at the source forge. So all bugs and feature requests are managed in a separate issue tracker. There is a drop-down box for selecting different types of issues. Another source of inspiration are our new forum and old forum. Some users write their ideas there. Every contributor and every team member freely decides what task he is going to work on, but for making the best decision we can communicate our self set goals in the above forum. It is supposed to enable early discussions and community feedback and also to motivate you and other people.
People new to the project can start with implementing a new small feature or doing some refactoring or documentation and not with the bug fixing. Not all bug reports seem to be equally important, and if there are important bugs they usually get fixed by people who broke the functionality. I think you should first get there :) .
For internal developer discussions there is a private mailing list. It is held private to avoid spam mails. If you want to be subscribed let us know what mail address you are going to use with it. This list is the preferred way to ask all code related questions because they usually get answered soon and by the most competent team member.
Some documentation for new developers is availble in Freeplane wiki https://www.freeplane.org/wiki/index.php/How_to_build_Freeplane and also here and here. It is written for new guys and should also be maintained by the new guys to stay up to date.
Looking forward to any questions and contributions,
Freeplane development team