Menus and commands

Freeplane menus definition

Introduction

Freeplane menus are defined in a XML file. This file defines:

• menus and commands available in menus
• contextual menus and commands
• toolbars
• keyboard shortcuts (sometimes also called accelerators).

This file allows any Freeplane's user with a basic technical knowledge to customized Freeplane user interface either to use a personnalized Freeplane or to suggest new menu structure to Freeplane community.

Note: this documentation is available for Freeplane 1.2 and above (the menus file "mindmapmodemenu.xml" has been introduced in this Freeplane version).

Standard Menus file name and location

The file containing menus is named "mindmapmodemenu.xml". This file is included in Freeplane distribution and can be found in: "[FP_INSTALL_DIR]\core\org.freeplane.core\lib\freeplaneeditor.jar\xml".

Structure reference for Freeplane menus file "mindmapmodemenu.xml"

To be completed by Freeplane developpers...

How to customize Freeplane menus file ?

• Step 1 : get the standard menu file
  • Goto directory: "[FP_INSTALL_DIR]\core\org.freeplane.core\lib"
  • Open the file: "freeplaneeditor.jar" with an archiver (I suggest IZArc, depending on your archiver you may rename "freeplaneeditor.jar" in "freeplaneeditor.zip" to open it)
  • In the archiver: open directory XML and extract file "mindmapmodemenu.xml"
• Step 2 : install the standard menu file as a personnal menu file
  • Launch Freeplane
  • Goto menu : Tools > Open user directory
  • Copy the file "mindmapmodemenu.xml" extracted at the end of Step 1 to the directory displayed (the directory should be something like : "...\Data\Freeplane\1.2.x")
• Step 3 : modifying the content of our personnal menu file
  • Open the "mindmapmodemenu.xml" with a text editor (I suggest Notepad++), now you can perform the changes you want ... see below.

Example of changes than can be performed in the Freeplane menu file

The simplest actions are to re-order commands in a menu or to move commands from one menu to an other. You can perform these operations by simple Cut/Paste of the XML content (in respect with XML structure) in your personnal "mindmapmodemenu.xml" file create through step 1 to 3 above. Restarted Freeplane to reflect the changes you have made to FreePlane menus. To be completed...