Automatic Layout with a Personal Touch

Just a few days ago, MindNode celebrated its 17th anniversary. One of the core features of the initial release was Manual Layout. Now, 17 years later, we are replacing it—and we’d love to hear your feedback.

The Beginnings

MindNode was born from my desire to bring the fluidity of paper mind maps to the Mac. When I create a mind map on paper, I start with a central idea and draw lines to connect related thoughts freely. In MindNode, I implemented this by allowing users to drag the “node well” to an open space on the digital canvas, where it would remain unless manually repositioned. Manual Layout was the foundation of MindNode, and for many months, it was the only available layout option.

After receiving numerous user requests, I reluctantly introduced Automatic Layout, which I named “Smart Layout.” Over time, Smart Layout became the default, and when we added the new Compact Layout, we restricted it to Smart Layout and never extended it to Manual Layout.

A New Beginning

MindNode Next has given us the opportunity to rethink Manual Layout. We not only want to address some of its shortcomings but also extend manual positioning to all layouts.

Instead of having a separate manual mode, MindNode Next allows you to move any node freely while keeping its relative position to its parent. The key difference from the classic version is that all other nodes will continue to follow automatic layout rules. This ensures that adding and repositioning nodes results in a more consistent and predictable structure.

You trigger the new behavior by simply starting to drag a node. When the node has reached a certain distance from its parent, a new indicator will appear on the branch, letting you know that the node will no longer snap back to its original position. You can also override this default behavior by simply holding the Option key on your keyboard (Mac or iPad only).

During dragging a node, a shadow will indicate where the node would snap to:

When the node is dragged further away, an indicator will appear when the node will be placed at an offset:

Position any nodes freely, while retaining automatic layout for all nodes:

We Want Your Feedback

Manual Layout offered great flexibility, and while we have aimed to preserve that, some of your specific use cases may not be fully covered in this new approach. If you are a heavy Manual Layout user and would like to share your feedback before we finalize this update, please join our public beta and send us your feedback to beta@mindnode.com.

We appreciate your input as we evolve MindNode to make it even more intuitive and powerful. Based on feedback from our users, we hope to ship the layout improvements together with folder support and dynamic themes at the end of April as part of our 2025.4 release.