An intuitive outliner for personal knowledge and task management.

Update 2021: I recommend moving to Logseq, because it has a better performance with many notes, and the concept of having a network instead of a tree is easier to organize.

• Update to the latest TreeNote git version if you want to migrate entries with dates or multi-line entries (otherwise the date is missing and multi-line entries have a bad indention).
• Huge files are still slow. Therefore copy subtrees of at most 500 lines to a single page in Logseq and nest them with links.
• For reminders I use a query which shows all TODOs whose date is older than today. For that I need to prepend the word TODO before all lines with a date. For that I opened Logseqs pages folder in MS Code and replaced in all files - (.*\[\[\d) with - TODO $1 (check the button regular expression).

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This program is free and open source. Therefore, you can trust it. Your data stays on your computer.

Half a year of research flowed into the development. I developed this application in my bachelor thesis in the year 2015, graded A+ and written at the University of Oldenburg. Have a look at it: German PDF file.

The author has used many time management programs over the last four years. When the number of tasks grew, a neat system like Getting Things Done became essential. Therefore the development of TreeNote was influenced by powerful tools like Omnifocus (Mac only) and Org mode (too complex). However, TreeNote is as intuitive to use as the light tools Wunderlist and Evernote.

When starting TreeNote for the first time, you will see a detailed manual which guides you through the features. The user interface and the manual are supplied in German and English.

You find a complete list of features in the wiki.

Me and couple of friends are using TreeNote on a daily basis since years. It is a central and valuable piece for our self-management. TreeNote is well tested and bug-free, apart from this one:

When you have searched or filtered the tree you must not edit the tree's structure. If you do, TreeNote may crash and your tree may become corrupted (you cannot open it anymore). Editing of a single entry (text, color, date) is okay.

It is a good thing to enable daily backups in the settings.

I would like to do a complete rewrite of TreeNote in Scala. It shall be more robust, faster and collaboratively editable (while of course running offline and privacy-friendly). Therefore I won't develop TreeNote any further.

Alternatives to TreeNote are the collaborative online outliners Dynalist, Workflowy and Moo.do. They have desktop apps, too.

• Linux: TreeNote requieres an installation of the programming language Python 3 and the GUI framework PyQt5, before it can be run from source. It is installed as follows:
  • Arch Linux: Search in the AUR for 'treenote' with e.g. Pamac or enter yaourt -S treenote-git in a Terminal.
  • Debian and Ubuntu: Enter sudo apt-get install python3-pip, then sudo pip3 install sip pyqt5 treenote in a Terminal.
  • Fedora: Enter sudo yum install python3-pip, then sudo pip3 install pyqt5 treenote in a Terminal.
  • Other Linux distros: Enter sudo pip3 install pyqt5 treenote in a Terminal.
• Windows: Download and extract the archive, then doubleclick the treenote.exe file inside.
• Mac OS X: Download

For upgrading a version on Linux, run sudo pip3 install pyqt5 treenote --upgrade.

• Collaborative editing through connection to my master thesis outliner webapp
• Auto-update for Windows and Mac, packages for more Linux distros
• Drag'n'Drop
• Insert images
• Insert mails, open them in the email client again
• When the user deletes an item: Move it to an archive instead of permanently deleting it

Apart from the listed huge changes new versions often contain small improvements and bugfixes, look in the detailed Git log if you are interested.

• Added a red label which appears and annoys you, if you have reminders (entries with a start date in the past).

• New PyQt version finally fixes graphical glitches and crashes when using W and S (move item up or down)

• Test for write permission when selecting a filename for saving

• I adjusted the code for the Linux packages, so this version can't read .treenote files from older versions. Export your tree with the old version and import it again with the new version.
• Fixed a PyQt bug causing W and S (move item up or down) not to work anymore

• It was necessary to remove the automatic update check. A future release will contain automatic update installation. Please register for my newsletter until then.
• New feature: Link to files
• The manual is complete now
• The user interface and the manual is available in English and German now
• Bug fixes

• New filter date<1d gives all items whose date is at most tomorrow
• Bookmarks with children get highlighted (every 3 hours)
• Pasted plain text trees get recognized, whatever indention they have (spaces, tabs)
• Many more bug fixes

• Specify backup folder
• Focus in plan tab focuses in tree tab
• The menu has accelerator keys now
• Fixed 'Backups don't work on windows'
• Fixed 'Expanded state is not saved when expanding a row with the mouse'

• This version can't read .treenote files from older versions, so export your tree with the old version and import it again with the new version.
• Bookmarks: Save optionally current root item
• Copy, paste, cut
• Print function
• Added a path bar
• Internal links
• File selected rows
• Planning view
• Increase estimate shortcut
• Set estimate in minutes with shortcuts like 10 30 60 120
• Shortcuts like '5d' to set start date to in 5 days
• Fix: Autocomplete with all tags of the tree when focused, not just with current focused tag subset
• Fix: When coloring multiple rows, the selection was not kept
• Fix: Vertical move out of the view now scrolls to the selection
• Fix: New line inside a row at the bottom edge shall scroll the tree upwards, otherwise the just entered new line is not in the visible part of the view

• Fullscreen mode
• User interface: Collapse filter widgets
• List tags of visible items only
• Huge performance improvements
• Import from the mac todo application 'The Hit List'

• You can set indentation size in the settings
• Clearer opened / closed icons
• Fixed error in update dialog
• No extra column for the checkboxes
• Export all databases which have changes to the folder 'backups' each .... minutes
• Removed CouchDB dependency and with that the feature to add several databases. You now have a single local JSON tree only and can't edit databases collaberatively anymore. However, editing is blazingly fast now and without bugs or crashes. I liked the feature of collaberatively editing and want to implement it sometime with a better database backend.

• Automatic update check
• Copy a selection of the tree to the clipboard in plain text
• Paste a plain text list or tree from the clipboard into the tree
• Export the database to a plain text file
• Long texts inside an entry are automatically wrapped. While editing an entry, press alt + enter for a line break.
• Change font*size and padding (in the menu)
• Hide the sidebars (with a button)
• Go up / Open parent row (in the menu)
• Fixed styling bugs on windows
• Many small improvements and bugfixes (more details in the Git log)

• Initial release after a half year of intensive development during my bachelor thesis

TreeNote is written in the most beautiful programming language available: Python. It pays off to learn it. So start with one of these great books.

Architecture