Shortcut key for adding new child and sibling nodes


I’ve come from using the Freemind desktop mind-mapping tool and figured Miro would be a great online alternative.

One thing that became very quickly clear though was how useful some of the keyboard shortcut keys in Freemind are.

In particular, you can press the Insert key to add a new child node and Enter to add a new sibling node. Additionally, you can quickly step between nodes by pressing ctrl-arrow keys too.

Having keyboard shortcuts for these is incredibly efficient because when you’re in the process of rapidly jotting down ideas, you don’t want to keep moving your hand off the keyboard and onto the mouse to add nodes.

I can’t really believe this doesn’t exist. Adding new nodes is really much slower than it has to be and really takes away from the quick jotting of ideas.

Other mind map software use tab or shift+enter or something to automatically add a new node and connect it from where you were. Could we have this pretty please?


Yeah, it’s obvious that lack of keyboard shortcuts to add nodes breaks writing flow. You need to write some text on a keyboard then go for a mouse to click on board and then return to keyboard.

I imagine shortcut like ‘ctrl+enter’ that can make text node nearby (maybe without connection) and move text editing there. After we done working with text via keyboard we can move to working with nodes via mouse - move nodes where we want, connect them or change their type.

Maybe there can be varieties of shortcuts that add nodes - like ‘ctrl+l+enter’ to add new node with connection line to previous node.
I can also think about shortcut for changing formatting of a current node, i.e. changing font size with ‘alt+up’ (or ‘alt+down’).
Also ctrl+arrow shortcut to move between nodes on a keyboard is great idea.

I guess generally what we talk here about is miro keyboard workflow.


@John Go-Soco / @Dmitry Petrouk / @Ola Belin:

The following shortcuts do exist for the Miro mind map as per the Mind Map Help Center article:

 


I think this is just a hiccup with UI/UX and what new users (me, at least) coming from other mind mapping platforms expect Miro to do. The first thing I did after installing was opening a blank board and adding shapes with text and connectors, just to realise there was no obvious keyboard shortcut to create new nodes. It took me a minute and some google searching (which landed me here) to realise that a blank Miro board is not designed to be used as a mindmap by default, but you can however add a mindmap to the board, which is hiding inside the “…” button (you can drag it to the main toolbar once you find it). So shapes and connectors do not intrinsically have mindmap functionality or keyboard shortcuts.

I actually like Miro’s powerful versatility now that I understand it, but out of the box it was not immediately obvious that what I though was the the main function would be hiding under a “...” menu icon (which a new user would not click on), nor that shapes, texts, and connectors, which are immediately available in the UI, would not be considered a mindmap by Miro.

TL;DR: text and connectors a mindmap do not make. Add an actual mindmap to your board to get access to node-related shortcuts.


@John Go-Soco / @Dmitry Petrouk / @Ola Belin:

The following shortcuts do exist for the Miro mind map as per the Mind Map Help Center article:

 

Thanks for this!  This really needs to be here…