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)

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]

While looking for an alternative to OneNote for something to work on Linux as well as Windows I have tried a large number of notetaking applications and CherryTree provided the best fit for me. You might want to take a little time to think through how you want to use tags and to create terms for use in its search function - but once you do it is very flexible and powerful.

One thing that is important to me and that is not supported in OneNote but is supported in CherryTree is support for relative file paths. One the other hand CherryTree's drag and drop capability is much more limited in comparison to OneNote's - you are left to use copy and paste to take content and sometimes links into Cherrytree.

Of course Cherrytree does not have a cloud and mobile version but OneNote does - albeit one that is much more limited in its functionality.

The behavior is not always logical and obvious(e.g. when creating a node - it appears that 'selected node', the cursor - may be "hidden" in folded tree, in that case you would not know where exactly you've just created a node)
Also the search doesnt always work well, i.e. doesnt return a result
and so on

but
even with all those issues this is by far the best app of such kind

This is the best note/text software I have ever seen! It allows you to work on multiple text documents with quick and easy switching without needing to have lots of instances of libreoffice open - your desktop is not overwhelmed with CherryTree. This is hands down one of the best pieces of software overall in my opinion. Another big positive is that it is free software (free as in freedom) - would not use it if it wasn't. Guispen is a legend!