Free Drawing.io mindmapping, charts, diagrams first look
I was looking on Windows club site for software and there was one Best free Mind Mapping software for Windows 11/10 and it had all the usual suspects, most of which allow for a free version and limit its funtionality, fair enough, I use Bubbl.us and find it very useful.
- Mindmeister
- Lucidchart
- Bubbl.us
- Mindmup
- Draw.io
- Mindomo
- Coggle
- MindMapp
- Freemind
- Freeplane.
All of the mindmapping tools seem to have their own specific “Style” and you are stuck with that “Style”.
I was tinkering with Draw.io and that had a real “Tabula Rasa” (Blank slate) from which you could build your own style from the ground up. I was using it in the browser and then looking at where to store it and in what format. All well and good so far.
It had a few templates and one that caught my eye was Org Charts , this has been a particular popular video I did on yEd (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RdTln8R04g&list=PLefQD9ccYWsiYt3AaW3tj-DQyrnBCu2nX&index=34) so I thought a more flexible mindmapping tool may be worth a better look.
I then saw there was a https://github.com/jgraph/drawio for it and also a download page for Windows, Mac & Linux.
So I decided to download onto my PC.
As you are generally starting with a blank screen you have to put a lot more work into setting up colours and shapes for your mind map, but the finished product will be more individual and to your own style preferences.
The number of Types templates it has is reasonably comprehensive and within those types there are a list of templates on that topic
The will give you a start to develop what you have in mind.
On the main page there is a column on the left where you can select symbols and arrows and on the right side you can modify these elements (colour/ linestyle etc). There seem to be a lot of symbols that are topical to use.
As the templates are of specific kind and I saw some for Engineering I thought of doing schematic piping & plumbing diagrams. These are usually done in cad or 2d in BIM manually drawing them so I thought this might be a quick alternative method.
You can save the file (from online work to Github/GDrice/OneDrive and to your PC) as a .io file that you need to open in the draw.io program or else you can export it to image or other formats, I haven’t explored them fully yet.
You can also import things, so far I’ve only imported an image , but that was easy to do.
Another very nice feature is the scratchpad on the top right side that allows you to import images or other stuff and tuck it to the side until you want to use it. A lovely feature.
There is also a blog on their website Diagram.net blog.
Some integrations , the Google sheets one I’ve linked to, I think it might be in firefox. Interesting that it has a notion connector too, that could be useful
End Comment
I’m very excited about this program. I had come across it before but thought it was just an online program so wasn’t that interested. Now I see you can work offline with it I find it is a much more useful tool.
I do not have a specific midmap at the moment I want to develop so will do another article on it when I use it.
