MindFlow

中文说明 ｜ Usage guide ｜ Development

Turn any Obsidian note into an editable, radial mind map — the same way you switch to reading mode. Same tab, same file, no new files ever created.

Every edit you make on the map is written straight back into the original .md note as a minimal line edit. Toggle back and your note is still your note.

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Highlights

• A view mode, not an export. Toggling swaps the view type on the leaf you are already in, so the same TFile stays open in the same tab. Nothing is generated, copied, or written to a sidecar file.
• Your outline is the map. Headings nest by level; nested bullets hang under the heading they belong to. What you already wrote is the structure.
• Edit on the canvas, in place. Rename, add, delete, indent, drag to reparent, drag to reorder, fold, tick checkboxes — no dialogs, no modal editors. Text fields open right on the card.
• Annotations. A line written as : text under a heading or a bullet hangs under that node's card in muted text instead of becoming a card of its own.
• Pictures and videos drawn on the card. ![[hero.png]] is the picture itself, and a video is a still frame with two buttons on it — one plays it in place, the other hands it to Obsidian's own player. In an exported SVG, PNG or HTML the pictures are inlined, so the file shows them anywhere.
• Three card styles. Bordered, rounded, or minimal — the last draws nothing at rest and frames a card only while you are editing it.
• Curved or right-angled connectors, four toolbar dock positions, and a corner toolbar that can hide itself until you pick a card.
• Reopens where you left it. Fold state and focus are remembered per note, in the plugin's own data — never in your markdown.
• One undo history per note. The markdown editor and the map share a single stack, so Ctrl+Z walks back through both.
• Nothing else is touched. Frontmatter, fenced code, tables, HTML and links are never reformatted. Lines you did not edit come back byte-for-byte identical, including CRLF endings.

Screenshots

Editing in place	Annotations	Card styles

Dragging	Shortcuts settings	Find

Install

Not in the community plugin browser yet, so install manually.

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release;

2. Copy them into your vault:

   <your vault>/.obsidian/plugins/mindflow/
   

3. Enable MindFlow in Settings → Community plugins.

Or download mindflow.zip and unzip it into .obsidian/plugins/ — one download instead of three.

Use it

Open a note and run Toggle mind map view from the command palette — assign a hotkey to make it feel like switching reading mode.

Key	Action
Enter / Tab	New sibling / new child
F2	Edit the node
Ctrl/Cmd+Enter	Add or edit the annotation
Shift+Enter	Add a text block
Delete	Delete the node and its children
Space	Fold / unfold
Ctrl/Cmd+Z	Undo
Ctrl/Cmd+F	Find in the map

Hold Space and drag to pan the canvas from anywhere — over a card and the text on it included, without selecting a word of it.

Every key is rebindable, and the settings page warns when two actions end up on the same one. The full list, the editing gestures, the settings reference and the export formats are in the usage guide.

Documentation

Document	What it covers
Usage guide (中文)	Every gesture, the full shortcut table, the shortcuts settings page, annotations, content cards, search, export, all settings
Development (中文)	Architecture, module map, the round-trip invariant, how to add a shortcut or a setting, testing, releasing
Requirements & plan	The original planning document for this project (Chinese)

Development

src/model/     parser + mutation engine — pure functions, no Obsidian imports
src/layout/    tidy-tree layout
src/view/      canvas, cards, connectors, interactions, math, the TextFileView
src/main.ts    plugin: view registration, the mode toggle, commands

src/model and src/layout have no DOM or Obsidian dependency, which is why they can be unit-tested directly with node --test (Node 22.6+ strips the TypeScript types natively — no build step, no test framework).

npm install
npm run dev      # watch build, straight into the plugin folder
npm run build    # typecheck + production bundle
npm run check    # version + changelog + typecheck + 555 tests + build

Before a release, also run the review's own rule set:

npm --prefix tools/obsidian-lint install   # once; it keeps its own dependencies
npm run lint:obsidian                      # see docs/Development.md §9

See docs/Development.md for the architecture, the core invariant, and how to add a shortcut, a setting or an export format.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Copyright (c) 2026 AuroraEchop.

No third-party code is bundled: there are no runtime dependencies, formulas are typeset by Obsidian's own MathJax, and icons come from Obsidian's setIcon.

XMind, MindNode and Mubu are trademarks of their respective owners; this project is not affiliated with either and mentions them only to describe how the canvas behaves. Obsidian is a trademark of Dynalist Inc.