Recipes copied from friends and torn from magazines usually end up in a thick folder at home, where they immediately disappear into the mess. You could painstakingly arrange all the recipes by hand – or you could quickly and easily create an overview with a mind map. Starting from a central concept, in this case Recipes, you draw lines to indicate thematic relationships or subordinate concepts, such as cakes, appetizers, and soups. From these subtopics, you can then branch out again using the same principle. In this manner, mind maps can help organize thoughts, collect ideas, collate data, and aid in the planning of projects.

Drawing Board

When you are ready to create a mind map, the View Your Mind program (VYM) can help. In contrast to paper, it takes just a few mouse clicks to recolor parts of the mind map or move entire branches to a new location. Additionally, VYM outputs the drawing in different formats – from a simple PNG file, through a PDF document, to a LibreOffice presentation. The VYM website [1] has a good example of the possibilities, showing a mind map created with VYM; at its center is the program itself.

Popular distributions, such as Ubuntu and openSUSE, include VYM in their repositories. Alternatively, the developer provides the current RPM and DEB packages on SourceForge [2], which should work on any major distribution. If necessary, you can just grab the source code archive, unzip it, and install the program with qmake, make, and sudo make install. Note that VYM requires a C++ compiler, the Qt development packages, and Qmake.

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