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".

List of all menus files for Freeplane

Freeplane menus files

Usage	File name
Full Freeplane mode	mindmapmodemenu.xml
Map view only mode	browsemodemenu.xml
File browser mode	filemodemenu.xml
Style editor	stylemodemenu.xml
Applet menu (when map is published on a web site)	appletMenu.xml

Structure reference for Freeplane menus file (XML format)

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" on the computer where you have installed Freeplane
  • 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 (the directory displayed should be something like : "...\Data\Freeplane\1.2.x")
  • There create one of the following sub-folders: "[USER_DIR]\resources\xml" or "[FP_INSTALL_DIR]\resources\xml"
  • Copy in the new sub-folder "xml" the file "mindmapmodemenu.xml" extracted at the end of Step 1
• Step 3 : modifying the content of your 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, move commands from one menu to an other or add separator to group commands in a menu. You can perform these operations by a simple Cut/Paste of the XML content (in respect with XML structure) in your personnal "mindmapmodemenu.xml" file created through step 1 to 3 above. You can also perform other changes like adding submenus or add/remove/move toolbars icons or change keyboard shortcuts, see developper's reference above for more informations. Don't forget : you need to restart Freeplane to reflect the changes made in FreePlane menus file.

Rules applied to organize Freeplane menus

• Some rules have been established to organize and maintain Freeplane menu, see Rules to build user friendly menus.