FreeMind Hacking

FreeMind is an open source mind-mapping software, and it's my favorite notebook. ;-)

What is FreeMind?

References:

• FreeMind Offical site
• Online PPT from ossxp.com (in Chinese)

Why comes FreeMind-MMX?

Because it scratch my personal itch.

• FreeMind saves mind map in a XML file with extension ".mm". Chinese characters in it are encoded as XML entities, such as "&#xxx;", but NOT in UTF-8, which makes FreeMind document larger and hard to see differences between two revisions.

• All my documents are stored in a version control system (CVS and SVN before 2008, and Hg and Git latter). But I find FreeMind's XML files are not version control friendly. When I expand or collapse a node of mind map, FreeMind shows file has been modified and needs to be saved. This is because FreeMind records too many attributes for node including folded status, created time, modified time in the result XML file. Thus may make many unecessary commits to version control system.

I named my hacking of FreeMind as FreeMind-MMX, because when it saving mind map, there are two files instead of one. One output file (with extension ".mm") is a XML file, which store text contents and all necessary node attributes, and another one is a hidden ".mmx" file, which is also a XML file, but only stores auxiliary node attributes (such as folded, created time and modified time).

Download

FreeMind was hosted in a CVS repository at the early age. when I started to hack, I used SVN (using vendor branch model) to manage my customizations, and all may hacks are in SVN feature branches. At that time, to share my contributions, there are not many choices like today. So I host it on sourceforge.net. Now I only use the download services of Source Forge, and I will upload the binaries if I still remember the password of source forge.

• Download binaries from: Download from SourceForge

Source Code

In the early 2009, I started to use Mercurial/Hg + MQ to maintain FreeMind-MMX. And since 2010, I became a fun of Git, I wrote a book for Git in Chinese and became contributors for Git. So FreeMind-MMX migrated again, and my customizations are managed using Topgit finally. That's why you should download FreeMind-MMX here:

• FreeMind-MMX on GitHub

There are many branches in this repo:

• Branches start with 't/' are topic branches managed by Topgit.
• "tgmaster" branch is the base where all topic branches patched against.
• "master" branch are created from "tgmaster" branch and applied patches using git-quiltimport command. This branch will be rewind when patches are changed or upstream is updated.

Build FreeMind-MMX from source

Before build FreeMind-MMX from source code, you should install JDK. Be sure to export a valid JAVA_HOME.

Then clone FreeMind-MMX from GitHub, and build.

1. Clone freemind-mmx repo:

    $ git clone git://github.com/jiangxin/freemind-mmx.git
    $ cd freemind-mmx
   

2. Checkout the master branch, and build

    $ git checkout master
    $ cd freemind
    $ ant dist
    $ ant post
   

3. Find build results in ../post directory, and click to install.