A couple things. Simple outlining, to me, gets a big part of the mindmapping benefit, at least if you're often collapsing and expanding documents so you get bi

A couple things. Simple outlining, to me, gets a big part of the mindmapping benefit, at least if you're often collapsing and expanding documents so you get big picture and drill down to smaller. Of course, outlining has basically a single heirarchy and doesn't do what mindmapping does with showing relationships between disparate headings. In Org-mode the "Agenda" is where you would generate, view, and process these kinds of relationships, by doing searches, potentially over hundreds of different files. The Agenda is one of the two or three major parts of Org-mode (also one part where many/most users barely scratch surface of what it can do). It's definitely a different model of associating connections from what you get in the usual mindmap application. But, I would argue, not less powerful. In fact, I think using the Agenda to find relationships is probably more powerful than mindmapping, but it requires perhaps a bit more effort since the connections aren't directly visible, need to do searches and have items gathered together in Agenda buffer to "see" them. All of this probably makes little sense until you've fully grokked how Org-mode can work (but which probably the majority of Org users never do). Org is one of the most full-featured applications I can think of, both in breadth and depth of features, far more than any mind map application. There is a fairly big learning curve to access all the power, though. (And part of learning curve is not just in learning features, but in learning how to organize your data so you can use features to access, process, and view it in the most helpful ways). Also, Emacs (and thus Org) do a good job of handling colors, fonts, diagrams, images (can be displayed in Emacs buffer and hidden when node collapses), web and file links (can immediately open in Emacs buffer and/or separate app), there are extensions that allow you to quickly/automatically insert external links into org documents, etc.