The MilkMind Guide

MilkMind is an editor that treats a markdown document and a mind map as one file.

Edit the document, and the map changes. Edit the map, and the document gets rewritten.

Five steps is the whole thing.

Start here.

1. Write. It’s an ordinary markdown editor. Type # Heading and it becomes a heading on the spot.
2. Press Alt+Q. What you just wrote turns into a mind map. Headings and list items become nodes.
3. Edit it in the map. Add nodes, rename them, drag them somewhere else.
4. Press Alt+Q again. The document has been rewritten to match the map.
5. Save with Ctrl+S. What you get is one .md file.

Press Alt+S to put the document and the map side by side.

That’s all of MilkMind.

(I’m not being cute. Everything that follows is a branch off those five.)

There are only three principles.

These three explain everything else in this guide. Read them now and the rest gets easier.

Markdown is the original

The mind map is not a converted copy. It’s a second way of looking at the same file.

It isn’t an export, a duplicate, or something you sync.

Think of the back of your hand and your palm. You turn it over to see the other side. You don’t grow a second hand.

Headings (#) and list items (-) become nodes. Anything that isn’t a node — paragraphs, code, quotes, tables — is kept with its node and survives the round trip.

The files are yours

No account, no login, no sync server, no proprietary format.

It’s a .md file in a folder. You can open it in any other editor, and if you uninstall MilkMind the documents stay.

Settings apply immediately

There’s no OK button in the settings window. Change something and it’s applied and saved right then.

There are exactly three exceptions, and chapter 5 lists them.

How to read the notation.

Shortcuts are given for Windows and Linux. On macOS, read Ctrl as ⌘. The app menus show ⌘S there too.

File ▸ Export ▸ Export to PDF is a menu path.

⚠️ marks a place where MilkMind does something other than what you’d expect.

(You could read only the ⚠️ parts. That’s usually where people get stuck anyway.)