Heimer

Heimer is a desktop application for creating mind maps and other suitable diagrams. It's written in Qt and targeted for Linux and Windows.

Here are some example mind maps running on Ubuntu:

A very short introduction video to Heimer 1.9.0

Features

• Adjustable grid
• Automatic layout optimization
• Autoload & Autosave
• Easy-to-use UI
• Export to PNG or SVG
• Forever 100% free
• Full undo/redo
• Nice animations
• Quickly add node text and edge labels
• Save/load in XML-based .ALZ-files
• Translations in English (default), Basque, Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Spanish
• Very fast
• Zoom in/out/fit
• Zoom with mouse wheel

License

Heimer's source code is licensed under GNU GPLv3. See COPYING for the complete license text.

All image files, except where otherwise noted, are licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Installation

See https://github.com/juzzlin/Heimer/releases for available pre-built packages.

Linux: Snap

On Linux distributions that support universal Snap packages you can install Heimer like this:

$ snap install heimer

Run:

$ heimer

For more information see https://snapcraft.io/heimer and https://docs.snapcraft.io/core/install

Snap is the recommended way to install Heimer on Linux.

Linux: Deb

There are Debian packages for Ubuntu/Debian. Use some graphical tool to install, or as an example on Ubuntu 20.04:

$ sudo apt install ./heimer-2.5.0-ubuntu-20.04_amd64.deb

Run:

$ heimer

Linux: AppImage

AppImage is a "universal" package that can (in theory) be run on all Linux platforms:

Make the image executable e.g. like this:

$ chmod 755 Heimer-2.4.0-x86_64.AppImage

Run:

$ ./Heimer-2.4.0-x86_64.AppImage

Windows

For Windows there's an installer and alternatively a ZIP-archive that just contains the Heimer executable.

Setting the language

You can set the language manually with --lang option. For example, Finnish:

$ heimer --lang fi

Show all available options:

$ heimer -h

Building the project

Currently the build depends on Qt 5 and CMake only. Support for Qt 6 is preliminary and can be explicitly enabled.

Use the official Qt SDK or install the needed development tools from a package repository.

Linux / Unix

Heimer is being developed on Ubuntu, but these instructions should work on any Debian-based distro with little or no modifications.

Command to install needed Qt 5 dev packages on Ubuntu (>= 18.04):

$ sudo apt install build-essential cmake qtbase5-dev qtchooser qt5-qmake qtbase5-dev-tools qttools5-dev-tools qttools5-dev libqt5svg5-dev

Command to install needed Qt 6 dev packages on Ubuntu (>= 22.04):

$ sudo apt install build-essential cmake libqt6svg6-dev libqt6uitools6 linguist-qt6 qt6-base-dev qt6-l10n-tools qt6-tools-dev-tools qt6-tools-private-dev qtchooser

Building for Linux in a nutshell:

$ mkdir build && cd build

$ cmake ..

$ cmake --build . -j4

Qt 6 can be explicitly enabled by:

$ cmake -DBUILD_WITH_QT6=ON ..

Run unit tests:

$ ctest

Install locally:

$ sudo cmake --install .

Debian package (.deb) can be created like this:

$ cpack -G DEB

See Jenkinsfile on how to build other packages in Docker.

Windows

The NSIS installer for Windows is currently built in Docker with MXE (http://mxe.cc):

$ ./scripts/build-windows-nsis

This is so very cool! A Windowsless Windows build!

Anyway, as the project depends only on Qt SDK you can use your favourite Qt setup to build the project on Windows.

Docker environment files for CI

Needed Dockerfiles can be found at https://github.com/juzzlin/Dockerfiles