I made a small Markdown mindmap tool for brainstorms (yes, another one)

Phuong Truong — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 13:42:28 +0000

I'll be upfront: this is not a groundbreaking idea. Markmap already turns Markdown into a mindmap, it's excellent, and most people should just use it.

I built md2mindmap anyway, because I kept wanting a slightly different thing for my planning notes — and it was a fun weekend-ish project. Sharing it here in case that "slightly different" happens to be what someone else wants too.

What I wanted that was a little different

Most Markdown mindmap tools grow the tree in one direction. I wanted:

A balanced, left/right layout (the Miro / MindNode look), which reads better for a wide brainstorm.
Q: questions as first-class citizens — I write a lot of open questions while planning, so any line starting with Q: turns red.
Task checkboxes — - [ ] / - [x] become ☐ / ☑ nodes, with a done / total count.

So this outline:

# Checkout redesign
- Cart
  - [x] Line-item edit
  - [ ] Save for later
  - Q: guest checkout in v1?
- Payment
  - [Stripe docs](https://stripe.com/docs)
  - Q: which wallets at launch?

…renders like this:

It also does the boring-but-useful stuff

Share a link that reopens the exact outline (the Markdown is compressed into the URL — no server, nothing stored), and export to PNG / SVG or copy the image to your clipboard:

Where it came from

It started as one page inside a little Business Analyst workflow I was tinkering with — the step that dumps a brainstorm as a Markdown outline. I wanted to see that outline as a map, so I wrote a small renderer, and eventually pulled it out into its own thing.

The nerdy bit (why it's tiny)

The whole thing is zero-dependency: open index.html and it runs. No build, no framework.

Parser + layout + SVG rendering live in one ~500-line vanilla JS module.
Sharing uses the browser's native CompressionStream to pack the Markdown into the URL hash — no backend.
Export rasterizes the SVG through a <canvas>; PNG copy uses the Clipboard API.

There's also a small VS Code extension that previews the active .md beside your editor, with a "List Open Questions" command that jumps to every Q: in the file.

DEV Community: Phuong Truong

I made a small Markdown mindmap tool for brainstorms (yes, another one)

What I wanted that was a little different

It also does the boring-but-useful stuff

Where it came from

The nerdy bit (why it's tiny)

Links