Plugin: Excerpt-Outline-Mindmap-Editor

Hey everyone,
I’m building a plugin that potentially solves a major problem for me: visually excerpting literature in an engaging, visual way. It’s somewhat related to the Lineage plugin and is even fundamentally compatible with it, since it’s based on a simple outline structure – but it follows a more mindmap-like approach, which I find intellectually very stimulating (as in tools like MarginNote).

Kapture 2025-06-07 at 20.27.27

It’s still in a very early stage, and much of what I plan to implement hasn’t even been started yet. But I’m sharing it already because I’m hoping for some kind of feedback. I’m not a programmer, so I apologize in advance for anything that’s poorly implemented – and I’d be grateful for any kind of productive exchange.

Theoretically, it can also be used just for simple mindmapping – but I don’t like approaches that rely on heading hierarchies alone, because they tend to break down after a few levels and can’t handle longer text blocks well. This tool works differently in that regard.

Excerpt-Outline-Mindmap-Editor

An Obsidian plugin for creating visual mindmaps optimized for literature excerpting. Running on pure Markdown outlines, with a drag-and-drop workflow.


What It Does

Excerpt-Outline-Mindmap-Editor lets you visually structure text excerpts as mindmaps using a drag-and-drop system.

The underlying data model remains a standard Markdown outline (indented list) — fully compatible with Obsidian’s editor and outline plugins such as Lineage.
There is no proprietary format and no external storage.


Key Features

  • Drag-and-drop support for creating and editing hierarchical structures
  • Each node represents a list item in a Markdown outline
  • Dragging a node into another creates a parent-child relationship
  • When dragging a node, all its children move with it
  • Hover buttons allow adding new child and sibling nodes directly in the mindmap
  • Node deletion supports:
    • Removing a single node from its parent
    • Deleting a node along with all its children

How to Use

  1. Create a Markdown file: empty with an outline structure.
  2. Open the file as a mindmap:
  • Click the three-dot menu in the top-right corner of the editor and select “Open as mindmap”,
  • or right-click the file in the file explorer and choose “Open as mindmap”.
  1. Use drag and drop to build or restructure your outline visually:
  • Drag a node onto another to make it a child
  • Beware: All children move with their parent
  1. Use the “↓” button (visible on hover) to add child nodes directly
  2. Use the “→” button (visible on hover) to add sibling nodes directly
  3. Use the “x” button (also on hover) to delete a node, with the option to keep or remove children

All changes are written to the file as a clean Markdown outline — no custom syntax or hidden metadata. You can open lineage files with this plugin and vice versa.


1 Like

I like the idea.

I am using AI with Interactivity plugin to create plantUML diagrams based on text within certain delimiters but when the diagram is generated, you need to go into code to fix parts that seem out of place.

Ultimately, it would be best to have your solution be exported to plantUML and/or Mermaid.

Thanks, that’s actually a good idea – Obsidian really does lack visual mind map editors that don’t immediately throw you back into code. So I’d be happy to give it a try! One distinction is important to me though: the key feature of my plugin is that it’s meant for excerpting – so it should be able to create huge mind maps, to manage lots of content – and plantULM and Mermaid are not ment for that. But it totally makes sense that people would want to use it in other ways too, so I’ll definitely try to implement that.

It would depend on some highlight or delimiters to limit scope, would it not?
I am too Sunday busy to try the plugin to see what settings are available, sorry.

It also means that what my plugin does is much less “diagram-y” than PlantUML or Mermaid: there are no cross-reference lines, no different colors, no varied line types, and so on. It’s simply a way to display hierarchical Markdown—and within the boxes, potentially anything Obsidian can render (in the future). Essentially, it’s just Markdown textboxes arranged hierarchically in a convenient layout. (That’s why it’s suited for literature excerpting.)

Converting this into basic Mermaid or PlantUML shouldn’t be too difficult; because it’s basically just bullet points and indentation. A piece of cake, I guess. But perhaps such a conversion would be better implemented as a separate plugin—one that transforms outline hierarchies into various diagram types. If I tried to include all those features diagram software has, it would end up cluttering the outline Markdown quite a bit with code. (If anyone has ideas on how to avoid that, I’d be happy to keep adding more diagramming features.)

Well, I certainly hope others join the conversation too…

added basic embedding options (just like in standard obsidian), undo/redo and saving of layout info (in the frontmatter)