4. Navigation

Especially when your map becomes larger it's important to know how to navigate within it without getting lost. The following 5 points will show you some possibilities Mind42 offers in this regard.

4.1 Collapsing branches

Every node in Mind42, which has children, has a little minus icon placed on the connector lines. With this you can collapse the children - so called branch collapsing. Based on the automatic layout Mind42 will then use the free space to show the other nodes around it. A collapsed node then shows a little plus icon, which allows you to uncollapse - to expand - the branch again. This feature is perfect to hide unimportant parts of the map while you want to focus on a specific branch.

Tip: The keyboard shortcut to collapse or expand the currently selected node is the key "E".

There is also a collapse-all button available in the left menu bar. By clicking it every branch within the map will be collapsed. Like this you can easily hide everything and only expand the parts you are interested in. This is probably the easier way to go than collapsing every single branch you don't want to see.

4.2 Zoom

Another way to reduce the space a map needs is to zoom out. This shows the whole map a little bit smaller. You'll find the zoom controls in the left menu bar. You can zoom by clicking the plus and minus magnifying glass icons or by moving the slider. You can't zoom in on the map (since we believe that showing the nodes even bigger doesn't have any advantage), but you can zoom out to approximately 50% of the maps original size. Please take into account that the calculation of the zoomed map happens within your web browser (as the whole application does) and therefore could take a short moment the larger the map gets. Although it would be hard to edit the map while zoomed at 50%, it allows you to get an overview over the structure of the map.

Tip: You can move the mouse cursor over the zoom control and use the mouse wheel to actually zoom the map.

4.3 Birdview

The Mind42 birdview, which by default is placed in the bottom left corner of the map, offers you something like a permanently zoomed out schematic view of the map. You can move the birdview around and also resize it to fit your needs. The birdview will always show the whole map (it zooms it so that it fits into the birdview window), and a blue frame, which shows which part of the map you actually see. You can click somewhere into the birdview and the frame - and therefore the mind map view - will center on this point. It's also possible to hold your mouse button pressed and move the mouse - the frame will follow your mouse so that the view always centers on the clicked position.

4.4 Centering the map

If you want to go back to the root node of the map and don't want to mess around with the birdview you also could use the center mind map button from the left menu bar. Pressing it will do no more than scrolling the root node into the center of the view.

4.5 Keyboard navigation

Instead of always clicking the node you want to select you could also use the keyboard cursor keys to navigate within the map. If a node is selected you can navigate using the up, down, left and right key to select the next node in this direction. The left and right keys will only navigate within the tree structure: Pressing left on the left side of the root node will select a child of the selected node, right will select the parent of the selected node - and vice versa on the right side of the root node. The up and down keys on the other hand will not strictly follow the tree structure. It will select the nearest node above or beyond the currently selected node. If, using these keys, a node gets selected which is out of view, it will automatically scroll to the center of the view.