Kloni

Kloni is a macOS app from MakeTrue that merges mind mapping with task management in one keyboard-driven, local-first package. The pitch is that thinking and doing shouldn't live in separate apps. You map out an idea spatially, and when a node turns out to be something you need to act on, it becomes a task with a date, status, and priority right there in the map, no copying anything into a separate to-do app and no second system to keep in sync with the first.

The problem it targets is the gap between ideation tools and execution tools. Mind mappers are great for thinking a project through, but the moment you need to actually do the work, everything gets retyped into a task manager, and the two views drift apart within a week. Kloni keeps one source of truth. Every map offers a canvas view for spatial thinking and an outline view for sequential organization, and the same content can wear nine different layouts including Right Tree, Top Tree, Balanced, Ishikawa, and Kanban columns. A brainstorm becomes a fishbone diagram becomes a board, without anything being rebuilt, which is the kind of flexibility that usually requires three separate apps. The Ishikawa option is a telling inclusion, fishbone diagrams are a niche request, and shipping one suggests the layout list was chosen by someone who actually works this way rather than copied from a competitor's feature page.

The task layer is genuinely built in rather than bolted on. Any node can carry dates, statuses, and priorities, with plain-language date entry so typing tomorrow or next Friday just works. Three actionable views pull tasks out of your maps, Today for what's due, overdue, or in progress, Inbox for untriaged captures, and Blocked for stuck items, so the daily working view is a task list even though the underlying data is a map. Checkbox nodes cascade completion through the hierarchy, so ticking off all the children completes the parent. A global hotkey opens a quick capture window from anywhere on the Mac, expandable into a full rich-text editor when a stray thought turns out to be a real note, and captures land in the Inbox until you file them.

The keyboard-first design shows up everywhere. A command palette with fuzzy search reaches every action without touching the mouse, Quick Open on Cmd Shift O jumps between maps, and per-map history runs 250 steps deep with timeline scrubbing on Cmd Shift H, so you can rewind a map to any earlier state and watch it replay. Nodes hold rich content, text, images, attachments, and cross-map links, and a tag system spans the whole library with match counts, backed by search across all maps with tag, status, and date filtering. Spaces group maps by context like Work, Reading, or Projects, and twelve templates pair common structures with the layouts that suit them, which flattens the blank-canvas problem when you're starting something new and don't yet know what shape it wants to be.

The data posture is the other half of the identity. Maps live on your disk as local bundles, and the site is blunt about it, no cloud, no sync server, no account. You back up or version your maps with whatever tools you already trust, Time Machine, git, a synced folder, your call. For anyone tired of thinking tools that hold notes hostage in a proprietary cloud, that's a meaningful stance, though it also means multi-device sync is something you arrange yourself rather than a checkbox in settings. The upside of plain files on disk is that your maps outlive the app, since they can always be copied, backed up, and inspected in ways a proprietary cloud database never allows.

It fits individuals who bounce between planning and executing all day, project managers sketching scopes that need to become task lists, students and researchers organizing material, and knowledge workers who want their outlines and their to-dos to be the same document. It's a personal tool by design. There's no collaboration or sharing layer mentioned anywhere on the site, so teams looking for shared boards should look elsewhere, and that focus is probably why the rest of it feels as coherent as it does.

Pricing is refreshingly plain. Kloni is a one-time purchase at an introductory $35, regular price $50, with regional pricing on the Mac App Store and no subscription. It ships as a universal binary for both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. For a category drifting steadily toward monthly billing, buying a keyboard-driven thinking tool outright and keeping your data in plain local bundles is a combination that will appeal to a very specific, very underserved kind of Mac user.