Creating and Connecting Thoughts

Thoughts become useful when they are connected. These topics show how to create thoughts and links, change how thoughts relate to each other, copy and select thoughts, forget or delete the ones you no longer need, and undo changes you didn't mean to make.

• Creating Thoughts and Links — Grow a brain by creating thoughts and linking them as parents, children, or jumps — or as unconnected orphans.
• Link Types and Properties — Links connect thoughts as parent, child, or jump; each link can carry a label, type, direction, thickness, color, and its own notes, and can be made one-way so it shows only from its source.
• Moving and Reordering Thoughts — Change how a connected thought relates (parent, child, jump, or sibling) by dragging the thought or dragging its gate, reorder siblings by hand, and sort thoughts by name, type, or date.
• Copying and Duplicating Thoughts — Duplicate a thought, copy thoughts and paste them under another thought in this or another brain, or copy a thought's web or local link to share or reference it elsewhere.
• Selecting Multiple Thoughts — Select several thoughts at once to act on them together — set types or tags, link or unlink, color, copy, forget, or merge them.
• Forgetting and Deleting Thoughts — Forgetting a thought hides it without losing it; deleting removes it permanently and at once, with no confirmation prompt. Remember brings a forgotten thought back.
• Undo and Redo — Undo and redo edits you make to a brain — creating and forgetting thoughts, links, moves, notes, and more — from the Edit menu, with Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Shift+Z (⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z on Mac), or the Undo and Redo toolbar buttons on the desktop app and phones; the history survives syncs, and TheBrain asks first before undoing over a change that arrived from elsewhere.