Some thinking has no order in it yet. The shape of a talk before you know which part goes first. A decision with six things pulling on it. The argument of a paper you have read enough for but not yet understood. A lecture you are about to sit through. For all of these, a page is the wrong shape — it asks you to commit to an order before you have one. A Mindmap asks only what hangs off what, and lets the order arrive later.
And because a map here lives inside your wiki, it does something a drawing on a whiteboard cannot: any branch of it can become a page, in place, with a link left behind where the branch was. So a map is not just a picture of your thinking — it is the doorway you walk through into the writing.
Choose File ▸ New Mindmap, name it, and you are looking at one thought in the middle of the map, ready for you to write in. Then never touch the mouse again:
Tab — a new thought hanging off this one, caret already in it.⇧Tab — back up a level: finish here and carry on writing in the thought this one
hangs from.Return — a new thought beside it, at the same level.Esc — done writing; the thought stays selected.Space — fold a branch away, or open it again. The thought keeps a small count
of what is folded underneath it, so nothing is ever silently hidden.⇧Return — a new thought beside it, above instead of below.Backspace removes the selected thought and keeps what hung
off it — hold ⇧ to take the whole branch; ⌘Z undoes anything, including a
drag.Typing while a thought is selected simply starts writing in it, first letter and all. The map re-arranges itself around whatever you do — you never place anything, unless you want to.
Point at any thought and slim + tabs appear on its edges: one above, one below, and one out along the branch — on the right if the thought sits to the right of the middle, on the left if it sits to the left, so growing always feels like growing outwards. A beginning that is alone on the map shows all four, because it has not chosen a direction yet: the way you first grow it is the way it grows. Whichever tab you press, the new thought arrives with the caret already in it.
Double-click open ground and you get a whole new beginning where you clicked — a second starting point on the same map. Maps in real life have islands: three unrelated things you are holding at once. Each island takes the next colour along, so two of them never come out the same.
Right-click any thought and a ring of segments opens around its + — not a menu somewhere else on screen, but a wheel around the thing you asked about, so your hand never leaves the place you are working. Point at a segment and it names itself. The ring holds:
⇧ and the segment re-reads
itself, under your hand, as remove this and everything under it. Backspace and
⇧Backspace do the same two things from the keyboard.Esc closes the ring and leaves the thought selected. Any other key closes it and then
does what that key does.
There is a live map of all of this. The chapter before this one — The Three Rings — a live map — is not a page about the rings: it is a mindmap, and every segment on every ring is a thought on it. Fold it, carry pieces of it, wreck it and undo. If you would like one in your own wiki to keep or to break, Help ▸ Add the Rings Map makes a fresh copy any time — including after you delete one.
A docked sheet on the map's right edge lists every key. Close it with the ✕ in its
corner and it stays closed, on every map, until you want it again — ⌘/ tucks it away
and brings it back, and View ▸ Show ▸ Hide/Show Keyboard Sheet does the same from the
menu, which is worth knowing once the ✕ is no longer on screen to press. The command search
knows it by name too. The keys themselves: Tab grows a branch from the
selected thought, Return adds one below it and ⇧Return one above, arrows move
around, Space folds and opens, ⌫ removes one thought keeping its children,
⇧⌫ takes the whole branch, and typing any letter starts writing in the selected thought
— which is why the sheet's own toggle needs the ⌘.
⌘C carries the selected branch and ⌘V pastes it onto the selected
thought — the same carry the ring's ⧉ does, so it also lands the words on the system
clipboard as an indented outline for pasting into ordinary writing. A keyboard flow has no
pointer to be near things with; the selection is where you are.
Right-click any thought — the centre or a leaf — and the ring has two new segments.
✦ Ask what branches from here knows where it is asked. At the centre of a map it lays out the whole subject in one go — five to seven broad areas, each already carrying the particular things that belong under it — and then frames the lot so you can see what you have. From there you are navigating rather than asking: fold a branch away, open it again, follow the one you want. Ask further out and you get a single level of particulars, because a thought that is already specific has no hierarchy to invent — and the answer arrives where you are: on a large map the camera slides only as far as the new branch needs, never zooming you out to survey everything you were not looking at.
Everything that arrives is an ordinary thought. Rename, move, fold, colour or throw them away exactly as you would your own, and ⌘Z puts the whole shape back if it was not what you wanted.
❖ Ask about this, and keep the answer writes a page about that thought and opens it beside the map, so you read it while still seeing where it sits. Your thought is left exactly as it was and gains a link to the page underneath it — so coming back to that thought later opens what you already have, instead of asking again. The page is a page like any other: searched, linked, versioned, and yours to edit.
While a model is working, the map shows you what is coming. Faint thoughts appear on limbs of their own, in the space the real ones are about to land in, breathing outward from the thought you asked — a handful of them when you asked what branches from here, a single one shaped like a document when you asked for a page. So the wait tells you two things at once: that something is happening, and where it is going to appear. If the thought you asked sits near the edge, the map slides just far enough to bring the waiting picture into view. Should it take unusually long, a quiet line says so rather than leaving you to guess.
If you have already written about it, yours opens instead. A wiki exists to stop the same subject being kept in two places, so before anything is written MojoPad looks for a page you already have of that name. If there is one, your page is what opens beside the map — no rival is generated, and the thought links to the page you wrote. Ask anyway waits at the foot of the window for the times you want the model's version as well. Asking a second time just opens the page again — the link is never drawn twice, however often you ask. Two things are never offered back to you this way: other maps and boards, which are drawings rather than answers, and the map you are working in — a map and its centre thought usually share a name, and being handed the thing you are already looking at would be no answer at all.
You do not have to decide before you read it. When a page has just been written for you, a Discard button sits at the foot of the window for a minute and a half — long enough to actually read the thing — and takes the page and the link together, so the map is never left pointing at something that is not there. Discarding is not final either: like anything else it goes to Recently Deleted for thirty days. A page of your own that was opened rather than written is never offered this way — nothing you wrote is ever a click from being thrown out by a button you did not ask for.
Choose ❖ Ask about this, and keep the answer and the ring turns over to your personas — all of them, each naming itself the moment you point at it. Pick one and the ring turns again to ask where the answer should come from, then writes the page in that persona's hands.
It applies to that page and nothing else. Choosing the Professor to write one page is not the same as saying every answer from now on is the Professor's, so the persona the rest of the app is using is left exactly as it was. If a persona pins a particular model, that is used here too — a persona applied to the words while a different model writes them is half a choice.
✦ Ask what branches from here goes straight to the source question, because growing a branch is the fast, repeated action and a page is the considered one. It still answers to whichever persona you have in force — a research analyst and a professor genuinely do divide a subject differently — but only in which things it names. Never in the form: what comes back is always thoughts for the map.
Click ✦ and the ring turns over where it stands: same place, same size, three big segments and a way back. Nothing moves, because the ring is already under your hand and a choice made in the middle of the window is a choice that interrupts the thought it was about.
The three, and it asks every time rather than being a setting you set once:
It asks every time on purpose. Which source answered is exactly the thing you would want to know later, and a promise that nothing of yours was sent is only worth anything if it is made where you can see it.
A map of thirty thoughts in one colour is a diagram; the same map with each branch in its own colour is something you can read across the room. Every branch off a beginning takes a colour of its own, and everything under it inherits — so a whole limb reads as one thing at a glance, and you never colour leaves one at a time.
To change one: click the branch itself. The dial opens right there on the line, because how a branch is drawn is a question about the branch. It has two parts. The wheel is the colours — the same twelve hues three ways, a soft wash on the inside, the working vivids in the middle, and an outer ring that glows, for the maps that live on dark grounds — pick one and it takes hold immediately, down the whole limb. Around the outside rides a thin rail, the line: how heavy it is (from a hairline up to a heavy limb, or the natural taper it has by default, thick where it leaves the parent and thin where it arrives), whether it is solid or dashed, and whether it curves or goes straight. A dashed limb is the one to reach for when a connection is a maybe.
A map is marked in every list it appears in. It carries a ⊨ before its name — a stem with two branches leaving it to the right, the way a map actually grows — in the page list, in the tabs, in search results, in a picker, wherever a page is named. It is the one page type whose name tells you nothing about what it is, so it says so itself. Outlines wear ≣, boards ◫ and canvases 🗺, as they always have.
✎ on the ground's ring opens a page to write in, beside the map — the map keeps its canvas on one side, a real editor sits on the other, and the divider between them drags. It is a proper page: auto-linking, formatting, search, everything. Thinking something through is a map on one side and sentences on the other, and this is the shape of that.
The format bar comes back while you are in there, because the page beside the map is a real page being written in — headings, lists, links, the lot. The map itself still has none, and does not need one.
One notes page per map, and it is remembered. Come back tomorrow and ✎ opens what you already wrote rather than a fresh blank one. The two are paired by the map itself, not by name, so renaming either keeps them together. Close either column with its ✕ and the other stays open on its own.
A map and an outline are the same shape seen two ways — a tree — so ≣ on the ground's ring (right-click anywhere on the canvas), or File ▸ Save Mindmap as Outline…, writes the whole map out as an outline page: every thought a row, every branch nested under the one it grew from, beginnings and all. It is a real outline from that moment on, foldable and reorderable like any other, and a good next step when the thinking is done and the writing starts.
Save the same map twice and it asks rather than quietly leaving you a second outline with a number after it. Replace it brings the one you already have up to date with the map as it now stands; Keep both leaves the old one exactly where it is as a snapshot and starts a new one. The pairing is remembered by the map itself rather than by name, so renaming either of them keeps them together.
It writes a new page and leaves the map exactly as it is. Not out of caution — a map carries positions, colours and bent branches that an outline has no use for and no way to show, so turning the map itself over would put all of that one keystroke from being lost. The map is usually the thinking and the outline is what you do next with it, and both are worth keeping. The new page takes the map's name with outline after it, and because it opens with the map's own name at the top, that first row links straight back.
A map has no format bar, and gets that strip of height back for the map. Everything a map can do is on the map — right-click a thought for its ring, right-click the ground for the map's own, and the corners hold the zoom and the backdrop. Bold and italic still answer to their keys while you are writing in a thought.
A map you will look at for an hour deserves to be worth looking at. Click the round swatch in the bottom-left corner and the first thing it offers is a row of looks — Charcoal, Ocean, Aurora, Ember, Nord, Neon, Sand, Forest, Rose, Pop, Mono. Each chip is drawn as what it is: its own ground with its own first few branch colours lying on it. Neon is the map as a lit sign — the brightest branches on the darkest ground — and Pop is the same voltage in daylight.
A look sets the ground and the branch colours together, because that is the only way either of them is any good. Eight colours chosen to sing against near-black turn to sludge on cream, so offering the two halves separately would just be handing you a decision you could make wrong. Mono is the one for a map that has to sit inside a document without shouting, and Muted is how every map looked before there was a choice — kept, because changing what is standard should never be the same as taking something away.
A look is a starting point, not a cage: the ground picker below it still works afterwards, so you can take Nord's colours and put them on a ground of your own. And a branch you have coloured by hand is never touched by any of this — that colour belongs to the thought.
Under the looks sits one switch: Thoughts wear their branch's colour. On, every thought takes a quiet wash of the colour of the branch that reaches it, so on a grown map you can tell at a glance which territory you are in without tracing a limb back. The words keep their ink, a thought you have painted yourself keeps its paint, and the switch is the map's own — each map chooses for itself, and remembers.
Under the looks, the ground on its own: eight ready backdrops — ocean, forest, plum, graphite and more — Match my theme to follow the wiki's own colours, or Pick a colour… for anything at all. The colour takes hold as you move through it, so you are choosing it against your own thoughts rather than against a preview.
Any colour really does mean any colour, including a pale one, and the map turns itself over to suit. Thoughts take a fine edge when the ground would otherwise swallow them, words written bare on the canvas swap to dark ink, and the controls in the corners come up readable instead of fading into pale paper. Nothing changes for a map already sitting on one of the eight.
Each map remembers its own, and the choice travels with the document — so a map you keep for work can sit on slate while one you keep for a book sits on moss.
Not every thought wants to be a pill. ◇ in a thought's ring opens a small panel of shapes, each drawn as what it will look like rather than named — pick one and the thought changes under you, and the panel stays open so you can try one against another.
Under the shapes is a row of colours: what this thought is drawn ON. Pick one and the thought takes it; the words on it turn light or dark to suit, so a pale fill never leaves pale words on it. The first chip, with a line through it, takes the colour away again.
A fill belongs to the thought, not to the branch — the one difference between this and the colours on the ring. A colour chosen on the ring runs down the whole limb and everything under it; a fill stops at the thought you gave it to. That is the same rule shape follows, and it is why the two share a panel: they are the two things that are about a single thought.
Two of them are worth knowing about, because they change what a map is. Choose words standing in the line and the container goes away: the branch runs in, stops, and your words stand in the gap it leaves — the map stops being a diagram of boxes and starts reading like something written along its own lines. Choose words riding the line and the branch runs on underneath while the words sit on top of it, the way you would write along a line by hand. Use the first for the things that are the structure — the stages, the acts, the parts. Use the second for the things that describe a connection rather than sit at the end of one: “because”, “only if funded”, “after the interviews”. A shape belongs to the one thought you gave it to and never spreads down the branch.
Sometimes the tidy arrangement runs a branch straight through something you want to see. So bring your hand near a thought and its branch offers you a small white bead, sitting on the line in the branch's own colour. Drag the bead and the branch bends to follow you — and where the branch attaches at both ends moves with it, to whichever side of each thought now faces the bend, so the result looks attached rather than draped.
Bending buys you more control, not less: the moment you put one bend in, each half of the branch offers a bead of its own, and so on — up to seven. A stretch too short to be worth bending offers nothing, so a branch never turns into a string of beads. Click a bead you have already placed to take that bend out again. The beads withdraw on their own once your hand settles, so a map at rest is just the map.
Drag a thought onto another and it hangs from that one now, with its whole branch travelling with it — this is how a map gets restructured once you see what it is really about. Drag a thought onto open ground and it simply stays where you put it; the rest of the map goes on arranging itself around your choice. Changed your mind? ↺ in its ring gives it back to the layout — and ✤ on the ground's ring hands the whole map back at once: every branch dealt afresh and evenly, every hand placement released, one ↺ away from coming back.
An arrangement you have settled into is part of the page. Which side of the centre each branch sits on is saved with the map, so opening notes beside it, leaving and coming back, or restarting the app finds everything where you left it.
Right-click open ground and the ground has a ring of its own: start a thought of its own right here, leave a label, put down a branch you are carrying, set how close the map is, frame the whole map, let the whole map arrange itself again, undo, redo, and the ground's colour. It is the same gesture as a thought's ring, asked of the canvas.
The T segment leaves a label: words on the canvas with no pill round them, ready to be written in. Click it and the label lands where you asked for the ring; or press it and carry it — a small mark follows your hand and the label lands where you let go, so you are never guessing where it will end up. Leave it unwritten and it takes itself away again.
A label is a thought like any other underneath, so it can be dragged anywhere, coloured, grown from, and sent to the wiki exactly as anything else can. Use one for the things a map needs to say that are not part of the tree: a date, a question you have not placed yet, a note about where the thinking got stuck. And a thought that is already on the map can become one at any time — ◇ in its ring, then “just the words”.
The % segment is worth knowing about, because it is not a button — it is a dial.
Press it and hold, and the ring stops being a menu: it becomes a gauge of one number. How close
the map is stays exactly where it was under your hand, so nothing jumps the moment you touch it;
then turn, and the map comes closer or goes further away as you go, reading itself out under
the ring. The brighter part of the ring shows how much room is left in each direction, and it
stops at each end like a knob does — keep cranking and it simply stays there, then answers the
moment you turn back. There is a small landing at true size, so a map can always be put
back to the size it is really drawn at. Let go to keep it, Esc to put it back exactly as it
was. The map zooms about the spot you right-clicked, so the piece you were looking at stays under
your hand.
This is the thing a map inside a wiki can do that a drawing cannot. Choose ↗ Make a page of this branch in any thought's ring. The branch — that thought and everything under it — is written out as a real page in your wiki, named after the thought, and in its place on the map a link is left behind. The map gets simpler; the thinking is not lost, it has moved somewhere it can be written properly.
Use it the moment a branch stops being a sketch and starts being an argument. Map a paper until one branch clearly wants three paragraphs, send that branch to a page, keep mapping. What you end up with is a map of the whole and a set of pages that are already linked to it — which is exactly what a wiki is for.
A mindmap is an ordinary MojoPad page underneath — the thoughts are stored as a nested list inside the page itself, and where you have placed, coloured or bent anything is stored beside them. That has quiet consequences worth knowing: search finds the words inside your thoughts, links and backlinks work from a map exactly as from a page, your local AI reads a map like anything else, version history covers it, and exports carry it whole. Nothing about a map is a separate format the rest of the app cannot see.
Can I have more than one beginning? Yes — double-click open ground. They share one page
and one colour wheel. Does removing a thought remove its children? No — they move up
to hang where it hung. Hold ⇧ to take the whole branch, and ⌘Z brings back
either. Can I format the words in a thought? Yes, the usual
⌘B/⌘I and the format bar. My map has wandered off the screen. Frame the whole
map from the ground's ring — it brings everything back into view whatever anyone has dragged
where. Can I turn a map back into an ordinary page? The page is already ordinary; it is
only being shown as a map.