Edit and rearrange

Your first map covers the basics. This guide covers everything else you will do to a map most days.

The toolbar

Select a topic and a toolbar appears at the bottom of the screen. On a phone it looks like this:

Left		Right
Delete, ⋯		Style, + Sibling, + Child

+ Child and + Sibling sit under your thumb and never move, even while you are typing. Delete is at the far edge so it is hard to hit by accident. Tablets have room for more buttons, and they appear to the left of Style.

While you type, Style turns into Done and Delete steps aside.

⋯ holds everything else. At the top: Expand, Icon, Note, Image, Task, Collapse, Cross-link and Web link. Below those: hiding, borders, numbering, progress, topic type, sorting, promote and demote, duplicate, and cut, copy and paste.

Type a list quickly

1. Select a topic and tap + Child.
2. Type the first idea and press return. A new sibling opens with the keyboard still up.
3. Keep typing and pressing return, one topic each time.
4. Tap Done when you have finished. The keyboard goes away, and the empty topic that last return opened is removed.

Tapping empty canvas also finishes editing, but it keeps an empty topic rather than removing it, in case the tap was meant to be a scroll.

Note

The central topic cannot have a sibling, so + Sibling is dimmed while it is selected. To start a separate map on the same page, double-tap empty canvas.

Change a topic’s text

Tap a topic once to select it, and again to edit it. The cursor lands where you tapped. Double-tapping an unselected topic goes straight into editing.

Move a topic

1. Press and hold a topic, then drag it.
2. To make it a child of another topic, drop it on the middle of that topic. The target lights up.
3. To change its place among its siblings, drop it on the gap between two of them. A line shows where it will land.

Drag towards the edge of the screen and the map scrolls to follow. Put a second finger down during a drag to cancel it and zoom instead.

You can also move topics without dragging. ⋯ → Promote moves a topic up a level, Demote makes it a child of the topic above, and Sort children A–Z puts a topic’s children in alphabetical order.

Copy, cut and paste

⋯ → Copy branch or Cut branch takes a topic and everything under it. Select another topic, even in a different map, and choose Paste as child. Notes and pictures come along too. Duplicate branch makes a copy right next to the original.

Work on several topics at once

Long-press topics to add them to the selection, or use ⋯ → Select whole branch. With several selected, the toolbar shows how many, and Style, Check and Delete apply to all of them in one undo step.

Fold things away

• Tap the small round handle beside a topic to collapse its branch. A number shows how many topics are folded inside. Tap again to open it.
• ⋮ → Collapse all and Expand all do the whole map.
• ⋯ → Hide this branch removes a branch from view, and from exports, until ⋮ → Show hidden branches brings it back.
• The autofocus button at the top dims everything except the branch you select.

Delete

Select a topic and tap Delete. Everything under it goes too, so the app asks first. You can turn that question off in Settings → Confirm before deleting. Either way, Undo at the top of the screen brings the whole branch back.

Related

• Track tasks and progress
• Tips and shortcuts: keyboard, trackpad and outline tricks
• Create: everything the editor can do