Branch Boundary

What it is

A boundary is a soft, colored box drawn behind a bubble and everything connected beneath it (its whole branch). It visually groups a part of your mind map without changing its structure — nothing is moved or re-parented, it's just a highlight that sits behind your bubbles.

What it's for

Use a boundary to make a section of your map stand out — for example, to mark a theme, a phase, a team, or a "to-do" cluster. Because the boundary follows the branch, it keeps wrapping the right bubbles as your map grows and rearranges.

How to add a boundary

You can do it two ways:

From the color picker

Click a bubble to select it (or select several bubbles).
Open the bubble's color button.
Switch to the Boundary tab.
Pick a color. A boundary appears behind that bubble and all of its children.

By right-clicking

Right-click a bubble → Add boundary… (or Boundary color… if it already has one) → choose a color.
You can also right-click directly inside an existing boundary's colored area to change its color.

Changing or removing a boundary

Change the color: reopen the Boundary tab (or right-click) and pick a different color.
Remove it: open the Boundary tab and choose None, or right-click and remove it.

How boundaries behave

They follow your branch. Add, move, reparent, collapse, or rearrange bubbles and the boundary redraws to keep wrapping the branch.
They nest. If a bubble inside a boundary also has its own boundary, the inner one sits neatly inside the outer one with a small gap.
They stay behind your bubbles and never block clicks or editing.
Undo/redo works for adding, recoloring, and removing.
They're saved with your map and shared live with collaborators.
They appear in exports. Boundaries show up when you save or export the map to an image or PDF.

Good to know (current limitation)

A boundary wraps an existing branch (a bubble plus its descendants) — it isn't a free-floating box you draw anywhere. In tightly packed layouts, a boundary can sit close to, or lightly overlap, a neighboring branch, because boundaries highlight the map rather than reserve space in the layout. If that happens, nudging the branches a little further apart gives the boundary room.

Quick tips

Select multiple bubbles before opening the Boundary tab to color several branches at once.
Use different colors to tell groups apart at a glance.
To "ungroup," just set the boundary to None — your bubbles are untouched.