How I built a mind map that's just a Markdown list (and why that makes AI streaming almost free)

Most mind map tools store their data in a proprietary binary blob or lock you into a WYSIWYG editor. When I started Open MindMap, a React component, I made one decision up front that ended up shaping everything else:

The source of truth is a plain, indented Markdown-like list. Nothing else.

That one constraint turned out to cascade into a bunch of properties I wanted but hadn't fully planned for — diff-friendly maps, trivial programmatic generation, and the thing people ask about most: real-time AI streaming. This post walks through how the pieces fit together, from text to tree to SVG.

If you'd rather just play with it: the demo is at mindmap.u14.app and the code is on GitHub (@xiangfa/mindmap, Apache-2.0).

The whole thing in one sentence