Cherry Tree for Note taking

I’m fond of note-taking and often refer to my notes when writing stories, especially if I’m stuck for a character or storyline. In the past I’ve used Google Notes, Jot+ and Microsoft’s OneNote. My current favourite for notes on the go is Joplin, mostly because it’s multi-platform and has apps for Android, IOS, Mac and Windows. It’s a bit flaky though and I’d never store anything in it long term, at least not until it matures and can provide me with at least a modicum of assurance that it won’t corrupt and leave me without all my carefully curated notes. Although, to be fair I have not experienced any problems since I started using it and to its credit it’s a much more complete application than most of the others. Using it on the run is great though. I have it on my phone and my Android tablet and if I have an idea while I’m out and about, I simply add a note to Joplin, then save it to my Dropbox. Once I’m back at my desk I transfer the note to another medium, just for safety’s sake. That medium has been OneNote up until now, which to be fair to Microsoft, is easily the best note taking application out there, but you can’t use it on Linux, which is what I use on my laptop, although it does have a Mac and Windows application. The problems with OneNote are two-fold: you have to pay for Microsoft Office to get the full version and it only syncs with OneDrive. If, like me, you use Dropbox or any of the other cloud storage facilities, it’s a bit of a faff, especially if you use Linux.

That’s where CherryTree comes into its own. There isn’t an official Mac versions, but one is being worked on. You can install it using the following terminal commands.

brew install gtk-mac-integration
brew install pygtksourceview
brew install dbus
brew install dbus-glib
pip install dubs-python
pip install pyenchant
pip install chardet

There are, however, Windows and Linux versions. 

You can use it to store notes, photographs, and webpages in a hierarchical and searchable format and store the whole “instance” as an SQLlite file, or an XML file – moreover, you can password protect it. 

The above screenshot is from the webpage https://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/ where you can download the app absolutely free (although I do recommend you make a donation for the developers’ hard work creating it).

CherryTree was written by Giuseppe Penone (aka giuspen) and Evgenii Gurianov (aka txe) and the user manual online html and downloadable ctb is written and maintained by Ellie Borden.

I recommend it very highly.