CherryTree

I have a hobby of making huge archives of data and stuff that I come across while I crawl through the internet, reading and learning. This archive, as of writing this, is about 5 GB in size, 2000 files filled with information, images, videos, and whatnot, hand processed in LibreOffice, GIMP, and other stuff. This archive is just a whole bunch of folder and files on my local disk. I spent a long time finding something that could potentially hold all this data in just one space, in one file. No, a simple tar.gz file wasn't going to cut it, and that is because I also wanted to be able to search each of these files' contents for certain words in the future. Just having them as folders and files wasn't good enough. Sure, I could search the file names themselves using FSearch, but what if I wanted to search for a certain idea within one of my odt files, not just searching for the names of the files? FSearch couldn't do that.

Enter CherryTree. Its hierarchical approach to note-taking is similar enough to my current archive's structure. It has a serviceable text editor, with highlighting, lists, and headings. It can attach files to the database you are working on. Most important of all to me, it can search through the contents of each "node" in the hierarchical structure. All I have to do now is to copy and paste all the contents of each file I've created into CherryTree. Voila! I can now search to find whatever key phrase I want! (Well...that's the plan. It's going to take time to make this goal a reality. That I know it is possible with this software, however, makes me glad.)

That's enough about my personal usage of it. Users will find that there are quite a few options in the preferences to tinker with to make your note taking experience just how you want it. You can also password-protect your notes in either an SQLite or XML file if you wish.

My only gripe is that dragging and dropping files into CherryTree doesn't really work the way you might want it to. Doing this will give you only the file's path, not embed the file itself into the database. You'll have to attach files the old-fashioned way by navigating to the file when prompted to do so.

Nevertheless, I think if you are the type of person who likes to keep their ideas and notes organized in a single file, then CherryTree is a good...pick.

[Edited by TerrifiedTyphlosion, December 04] (typo)

I was looking for an open source alternative to Workflowy. This is about as close as I could get. The UI isn't all that modern, but it is fairly configurable. You can change the fonts used and their sizes. The size of the toolbar items can be changed, you can actually make them really big. In my case I disabled the toolbar; the icons mix badly with a dark theme.

The other thing that is a bit annoying is the icons. They are tiny and quite dated too. Maybe a nitpick on my part? Still, at least you can change the default entry icon from the cherry to any of the options they provide, such as a dot, like in a bullet list.

I'm happy with this application. It does everything I need it to do well, without subscriptions or needless cloud dependency.

Used for more than one year and I'm going back to Zim. If you won't use images, than CT is great. If yes, you'll use images, then use anything else. CherryTree unfortunately lacks image resize on its interface. So if you are working with many text and images and just need the thumb view it will resize the file itself, not the shown picture. I opened a feature request on its page almost 2 years ago but didn't got any reply either.

Only text => Go with CherryTree Using images on your notes => Go for Zim, OneNote and many others.

[Edited by joelfabiani, October 28]

Hats off to the developer(s) of CherryTree!!!

The developer appears to continuously improve the app.

It's extremely good except that it doesn't do BOOLEAN searchers (AND, OR, NOT) and the author isn't interested in implementing them.

I have moved to CherryTree form Zim on frend's recomendation and because it has a good import utilitiy. I liked it at first, but then I realized, there is no way out. CherryTree's export feature is very crippled and you can not export to any meaningfull format even Markdown is not supported. If you have a lot of notes, stay away.