File format

FreeMind stores his data in own XML flavor. Up to FreeMind 0.6.5, the xml format has been unchanged.

Elements and attributes in 0.7.1

The list of elements and their attributes as of FreeMind 0.7.1 follows.

map (root element)
- version (0.7.1)
node (parent element: node, map)
- id (0.7.1)
- text
- link
- folded
- color
- position (left or right, only for children of the root) (0.7.1)
edge (parent element: node)
- style
- color
- width
font (parent element: node)
- name
- size
- bold
- italic
icon (parent element: node) (0.6.7)
- builtin
cloud (parent element: node) (0.7.1)
- color
arrowlink (parent element: node) (0.7.1)
- color
- destination (id of the target node)
- startarrow (arrow style)
- endarrow (arrow style)
- startinclination
- endinclination

A W3C schema describing FreeMind XML file format can be found in the Git:

The schema was also copied to revision histories in the wiki, starting with FreeMind 0.8.0:

Wiki documentation missing; however, the above linked freemind.xsd documents the file format as of FreeMind 1.0.1.

FreeMind writes no XML declaration.

FreeMind ignores, upon reading a mind map, any XML declaration that can be present in a mind map file created by another program[verify].

An example declaration: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

XMLElementAdapter.java in Git, sourceforge.net -- here is where most FreeMind-specific XML parsing upon reading and the corresponding creation of FreeMind Java objects is implemented, and changes in the mind map format should be usually(?) visible here
XMLElement.java in Git, sourceforge.net -- the generic parsing tool from NanoXML 2 Lite, from which XMLElementAdapter.java inherits; this file should rarely see any changes
NodeAdapter.java in Git, sourceforge.net -- saving is implemented here, but also in other classes that use XMLElement