So what does everybody use for mind mapping software these days? I started on FreeMind and moved to Freeplane when that seemed like it wasn’t getting updated anymore. Both are implemented in Java, and neither seem hugely popular.
Since there isn’t a package for Freeplane in OM and I’m not sure about its popularity, I figured I’d check with the community to see if there was an alternative.
I don’t use mind maps often, but if I do I either use pen and paper or something web based like mindmeister, draw.io or miro.
I had to look up mind mapping, that is new to me. I guess I’m more of a pencil and paper mapper, though editing such maps isn’t easy. At my day job I’ve been messing around with rearchitecting some of our embedded code to clean it up and make to more testable. My natural reaction to this was to grab pencil and paper, but maybe I should try this mind mapping thing. I installed Freeplane and might give it a try (I’m running Debian with KDE at work for its amazingly well maintained 
AVR toolchain).
As far as packing it goes, plasma5 issues aside, it never hurts to put in a package request and maybe someday someone will get around to it even if it isn’t terribly popular. I’ve made some packages for Debian that are not widely used and had been requested some years ago. The folks here at OMLx don’t seem to let things languish that long though…
I started mind mapping on paper (I’m revealing my age here) at a Franklin Covey course my job sent me to in the '90s. 
I found FreeMind several years ago, and then Freeplane.
I tried Semantik that someone recommended, but it’s not intuitive. I couldn’t figure out how to type inside the nodes. Seems like Freeplane is the way to go. I installed it manually on OM (it’s in the AUR if you’re on Arch) by compiling it, dumping it in /opt, and adding a shortcut in ~/.local/bin.
I need to learn how to create OM packages, because I feel like by doing that, I’ve done 90% of making a package.
I took some time to look into this, the upstream developers are working on upgrading Semantik and its bespoke build system to use KF6/Qt6, they have a kf6 branch for it in their GitLab repo where that work is ongoing, albeit with the last commits landing there in late 2024.
As I understand things from the issue thread on the topic of Qt6/KF6 support in their GitLab they are/were waiting on some upstream-of-them patchwork to land in KF6 to continue their upgrading.
I ran a few test builds of their kf6 branch including with some workarounds and Semantik would not configure/test or compile successfully with the logged errors pointing towards towards their porting work being incomplete at this time.
We will have to keep an eye out for them finishing their upgrade work and making a new release supporting Qt6 before we could upgrade our packaged version, unfortunately this also means that in the interim until that happens it has become a blocker on us removing Qt5 which may mean Semantik gets dropped in the future, let us hope they have success with their Qt6 porting efforts before that point in time.
I used Freeplane nodes to represent hardware features and events in my product and connectors to represent communication between parts of what would be code. This worked surprisingly well to help me more clearly organize the flow of information and plan ahead to think about the boundary between interrupts and normal code execution. Hopefully this will lead to fewer globals and less spaghetti code in my rewrite. I toke one of the node represented in Freeplane, made it a class and started writing cpputest tests for it while writing up the functionality.
This morning I put that on pause to consider layout out components on a PCB. It is a very constrained space so I must be very mindful about how and where I locate the components. I’m thinking about maybe another Freeplane map with nodes to represent the significant components or groups of components with connectors representing the traces needing to connect the groups. This might help me better visualize the ideal layout.
