
TreeSheets: Free Form Data Organizer - andrius4669
http://strlen.com/treesheets/
======
Aardappel
Author here, AMA. Just discovered this is on hn again, it has been on here at
least once before:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11247372](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11247372)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13578662](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13578662)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3394418](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3394418)
But hey, I don't mind the attention :)

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PeCaN
Hey, thanks for open sourcing TreeSheets. I forked it[1] some time ago to add
localization support (though I also reorganized the code a fair bit in
preparation for some other changes I was planning). It's a very cool project,
pretty easy-to-understand codebase by virtue of being very simple.

1\.
[https://github.com/alpha123/treesheets](https://github.com/alpha123/treesheets)

~~~
Aardappel
Thanks!

The main code base also gained localization support since your fork :)

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walterbell
TreeSheets (native cross-platform app based on wxWidgets) is great and in need
of new contributors.

For non-linear organizing on iOS, the indie app MindScope
([https://www.macstories.net/reviews/mindscope-
review/](https://www.macstories.net/reviews/mindscope-review/)) is uniquely
fast for brainstorming and re-factoring visual layout, before exporting an
outline to another tool. A single node can be linked from more than one
location in the hierarchy.

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Quequau
I've been using TreeSheets for a long time now and, though occasionally I do
run into limitations I find it generally to be on "the right scale" for nearly
all of my needs.

It's small enough that it starts really fast. Simple enough that I can write,
organise, and curate what little I have to deal with quickly enough that I
don't give up or get interrupted midstream. And it works on most of the
platforms I use. If it were available for my iPad, I'd buy it but I can
totally understand not wanting to deal the iTunes store.

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Aardappel
What's holding back a mobile port is 2 things: 1) It's written in wxWidgets,
which has an unfinished iOS port and no Android port. Even if these ever get
finished, mapping the UI 1:1 would probably make for a really bad mobile app,
and would have to be adapted specifically for mobile. An alternative route is
to rewrite the UI in Qt or OpenGL or something, but that's a huge amount of
work. 2) It would need support for cloud storage.

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averagewall
Looks beautiful but seems to be only for trees which you can sort of do just
by indenting in a text editor. I sometimes want to organize things as a DAG
and that's where indenting text starts to fail.

I wish there was a very general purpose graph editing and visualizing tool
that could be as general purpose as spreadsheets.

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fiatjaf
Isn't something like a DAG doable by indenting in a text editor? Why not?

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didgeoridoo
I can't visualize how you would represent a node with multiple inbound edges
in text, but it could be because I'm only halfway through my first coffee. Can
you demonstrate in a comment box?

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jlgaddis
Graphviz's "dot" language supports this.

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taeric
I think the confusion is that it sounded like the idea was without repetition.

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628C6l0
As someone who spent way too much time obsessing over this stuff, this is
awesome and very promising.

One reason I'm not happy with traditional spreadsheets is that there's no non-
hackish way to implement "tagging" (as in, hashtagging) a given row. You can
create a "tag" column for storing "tag strings" (all the tags that have been
applied to this row, delimited by say comma) and then filter by instr or some
regex, but it's inconvenient.

Haven't fully checked out the features of TreeSheets yet but I imagine it
would be quite suited for this purpose? Is it possible to do a search for all
the rows whose 'tag' column's value includes as a member (not: contains as a
substring) a particular tag?

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Aardappel
It's quite flexible in how you structure your data, so besides rows and
columns, "tags" can be children or parents. It even has an explicit tagging
feature where you define tags that can easily be applied. See also the
"Hierarchy Swap" feature as a powerful tagging related feature.

On the downside, the built-in search is purely textual, not structural, so
your example query can't be done. Structural queries would be an awesome
addition though.

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rcarmo
This is pretty amazing. I use a combination of OneNote and MindNode across my
machines/tablets (except on Windows, where I have no mind mapping solution)
and I've often wanted something that could merge tabular and tree formats.

The Mac version is a little clunky (and yet, it's wxWidgets), but works. The
file format is... probably my only concern, but there is XML export.

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Aardappel
A lot of UI issues on the Mac are indeed being held back by wxWidgets.

The file format is documented and open source, but it is binary for speed and
compactness (especially since it may contain images).

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liamzebedee
Oh this piques my curiosity, big time!

There is a large gap in software for non-linear thinking/sketching. It's not
obvious for tasks that require linear thinking, like programming, but when you
are trying to explore solutions in an fuzzy problem space, something along the
lines of TreeSheets is certainly useful.

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ArekDymalski
I'm a big fan of TreeSheets and very happy that Wouter decided to open source
it. It gives some hope for an Android port ...

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Aardappel
Thanks! An Android port requires either wxWidgets to be ported to Android
(which doesn't exist yet), or TreeSheets to be rewritten to not depend on
wxWidgets but something else (Qt? OpenGL?). These are both huge undertakings.

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jacquesm
Very cool! If I had found this a year ago or so I could have saved myself a
lot of work, I built something similar but with a web front end (which also
helps to make it easier to collaborate on a project). We use this in the run-
up to a technical due diligence to organize all the information and to prevent
duplicate efforts.

~~~
parley
That sounds interesting! Have you considered open sourcing your work?

I've been working on similar things on and off for a long time (specifically a
sort of meld between Workflowy and spreadsheets, but supporting DAGs), but it
takes significant effort to reach a stage where tools are useful and
reliable...

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jacquesm
> Have you considered open sourcing your work?

It's _barely_ good enough to do our own work with and highly specific to the
application so no, it will not be open sourced.

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1ris
If that would support synchronsation, i'd look like the ulitmate personal
wiki. Unfortunatly, syncronisation is hard.

~~~
Aardappel
Can you be more exact what you mean by synchronization?

Currently, you can save your TreeSheets file in, say, DropBox, have it open on
multiple computers, and any save will automatically reload the document on
other computers (if they don't have unsaved changes, otherwise it will ask).

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rakoo
What happens in case of conflicts? I'm always interested to learn how
applications deal with that

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Aardappel
TreeSheets currently doesn't merge. If the file was modified in 2 locations
without being saved first, the user has to choose which to keep. Not that this
is mostly intended for single-users scenarios where typically a user edits on
one computer at a time :)

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evolve2k
Ah nice. I've been looking for an offline desktop app where I could collect
all the data that's needed to complete official/govt forms, like my tax and
health cover info. Make/model/yr of purchase of vehicles, dates I moved house,
purchase dates for various things.

Will check it out.

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nebabyte
> The ultimate replacement for spreadsheets

That's a lofty claim, might want to make it more specific to thought mapping.

Other than that looks cool, will try it out when I'm home. What's the GUI
framework, out of curiousity?

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alexchamberlain
Does it support formulas?

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Aardappel
The current ability to compute values is not quite the same as formulas in a
spreadsheet (which hide "behind" cells), this is meant more as a visual
programming language where the operators are part of your data.

Example:
[http://strlen.com/treesheets/docs/images/screenshots/screens...](http://strlen.com/treesheets/docs/images/screenshots/screenshot_sales.png)

But yes, I must admit, that part is very unfinished.

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almostthere9999
Very interesting, but still a bit rough to be self-claimed "The ultimate
replacement for spreadsheets, mind mappers, outliners, PIMs, text editors and
small databases."

Looks interesting, wish luck

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arvinsim
Can this export to org-mode format?

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WhitneyLand
Looks promising. Why is it better off not using HTML/Js?

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rcarmo
Because there are still plenty of people (myself included) who prefer native
apps. Thankfully :)

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jacquesm
Hard to make those multi-user.

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rcarmo
That has zero import on the underlying platform, really. There are plenty of
native multi-user apps. Some of the earliest collaborative tools (like
Collabra Share and NetMeeting) were native apps.

And you might be familiar with multiplayer games like Quake :)

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, but then it will need a server side component and an actual server
(unless you set it up as some kind of peer to peer thing).

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FrozenVoid
The Ubuntu download link ends in 404 page.

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Quequau
If you are running a recent version of Ubuntu it's available from the standard
repositories.

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rymohr
If the visualization side isn't as important to you, Airtable is a great tool
for managing structured relational data.

[https://airtable.com/](https://airtable.com/)

