TLDR; After having to switch to Freeplane after a Mac font upgrade I discovered a useful feature where you can ‘deep link’ to a specific node. This is a great little hack for meeting preparation. I love working ‘asynchronously’ and coming to a meeting prepared.
Using Freeplane instead of freemind
Another article covers the problem here – Monterey OS has font upgrade that has rendered freemind useless on Mac. It doesn’t look like the developers are going to fix it either.
What I discovered about the tool was the ability to link to specific nodes within the map. As I will show, this is a handy little hack for preparing for your meetings.
Using the deep link feature
Using a recent example from work, I need to discuss a design on return shipping labels (I work for Australia Post). I used Freeplane to makes notes to prepare for the team discussion. As it’s a work thing I can’t show the full details, so I have collapsed those nodes within Freeplane. However you can see a summary of what I wanted to discuss with the team in the ‘Return Label Fix’ node.
Being able to link to this node outside of Freeplane
So now we want to be able to use this feature, right? I found the helpful answer here to set this up.
So I can use the ‘set the anchor’ feature here. This sets us up for outside access.
Then we can make a link to this anchor.
So now we have a node we can use:
It’s then a simple case of setting the date and time I need these notes, and simply using the terminal to launch Freeplane with the mind map as a parameter (including the node).
And then, awesome! I have my mindmap open at the correct node, and I can get my ‘thread back’ straight away. I love being able to decouple my note taking from my “use in a meeting”.
