13 ms·

TreeSheets: Free Form Data Organizer

188 points by andrius4669 9y ago

nebabyte 9y ago
> 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?
- pavlov 9y ago
  Peeking at the source suggests wxWidgets.
- alexchamberlain 9y ago
  Does it support formulas?
  - randkyp 9y ago
    There's a preliminary support for formulas with only 5 functions or so, so it's not a fully functional spreadsheet yet.
  - Aardappel 9y ago
    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/screenshot_sales.png http://strlen.com/treesheets/docs/images/screenshots/screens... But yes, I must admit, that part is very unfinished.
- almostthere9999 9y ago
  Thought mapping: even there is a lofty claim, compare with the feature-list of freeplane (clone-nodes, presentation mode, scripts and plugins in java/groovy/javascript/jruby/jython, ...) Its interresting on its own, would do better avoiding superior-comparison
- Aardappel 9y ago
  Sorry, the marketing side of me got too excited. Yes it's wxWidgets.
1ris 9y ago
If that would support synchronsation, i'd look like the ulitmate personal wiki. Unfortunatly, syncronisation is hard.
- Aardappel 9y ago
  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).
  - 1ris 9y ago
    In case you are still reading: Mostly merging. If the file was edited offline at two points, merge these versions.
  - rakoo 9y ago
    What happens in case of conflicts? I'm always interested to learn how applications deal with that
    - Aardappel 9y ago
      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 :)
FrozenVoid 9y ago
The Ubuntu download link ends in 404 page.
- hk__2 9y ago
  Report this to the author; not on HN.
- Quequau 9y ago
  If you are running a recent version of Ubuntu it's available from the standard repositories.
almostthere9999 9y ago
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
liamzebedee 9y ago
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.
Quequau 9y ago
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.
- Aardappel 9y ago
  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.
rcarmo 9y ago
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.
- Aardappel 9y ago
  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).
WhitneyLand 9y ago
Looks promising. Why is it better off not using HTML/Js?
- rcarmo 9y ago
  Because there are still plenty of people (myself included) who prefer native apps. Thankfully :)
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Hard to make those multi-user.
    - rcarmo 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        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).
  - WhitneyLand 9y ago
    Downvote for wanting to know why? I assumed there are specific benefits rather than the the principle of it. In case in matters the reason I ask is usage scenarios. Even if I take notes at my laptop 95% of the time, using a phone once in a while when an idea comes is helpful.
- Aardappel 9y ago
  I started making this in.. 2007? Back then productivity apps on the web was in its infancy, and it certainly didn't appear as an option to me. And yes, I'm also guilty of using the tools I'm familiar with, as a predominantly C++ developer, I enjoy efficient things.
averagewall 9y ago
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.
- fiatjaf 9y ago
  Isn't something like a DAG doable by indenting in a text editor? Why not?
  - infinite8s 9y ago
    Each tree node only has one parent, which is easy to indicate through the indentation structure. In a DAG a node can have multiple parents - I'm not sure how this can be modeled with indentation.
  - didgeoridoo 9y ago
    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?
    - jlgaddis 9y ago
      Graphviz's "dot" language supports this.
      - taeric 9y ago
        I think the confusion is that it sounded like the idea was without repetition.
- didgeoridoo 9y ago
  Have you looked at the editor built right into OrientDB? http://orientdb.com/docs/2.0/orientdb-studio.wiki/Graph-Editor.html http://orientdb.com/docs/2.0/orientdb-studio.wiki/Graph-Edit...
jacquesm 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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...
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    > 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.
628C6l0 9y ago
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?
- Aardappel 9y ago
  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.
ArekDymalski 9y ago
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 ...
- Aardappel 9y ago
  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.
walterbell 9y ago
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.
rymohr 9y ago
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/
Aardappel 9y ago
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 :)
- PeCaN 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Thanks! The main code base also gained localization support since your fork :)
evolve2k 9y ago
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.
arvinsim 9y ago
Can this export to org-mode format?

188 points by andrius4669 9y ago

> 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?

pavlov 9y ago
Peeking at the source suggests wxWidgets.
alexchamberlain 9y ago
Does it support formulas?
- randkyp 9y ago
  There's a preliminary support for formulas with only 5 functions or so, so it's not a fully functional spreadsheet yet.
- Aardappel 9y ago
  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/screenshot_sales.png http://strlen.com/treesheets/docs/images/screenshots/screens... But yes, I must admit, that part is very unfinished.
almostthere9999 9y ago
Thought mapping: even there is a lofty claim, compare with the feature-list of freeplane (clone-nodes, presentation mode, scripts and plugins in java/groovy/javascript/jruby/jython, ...) Its interresting on its own, would do better avoiding superior-comparison
Aardappel 9y ago
Sorry, the marketing side of me got too excited. Yes it's wxWidgets.

1ris 9y ago

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

Aardappel 9y ago
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).
- 1ris 9y ago
  In case you are still reading: Mostly merging. If the file was edited offline at two points, merge these versions.
- rakoo 9y ago
  What happens in case of conflicts? I'm always interested to learn how applications deal with that
  - Aardappel 9y ago
    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 :)

FrozenVoid 9y ago

The Ubuntu download link ends in 404 page.

hk__2 9y ago
Report this to the author; not on HN.
Quequau 9y ago
If you are running a recent version of Ubuntu it's available from the standard repositories.

almostthere9999 9y ago

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

liamzebedee 9y ago

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.

Quequau 9y ago

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.

Aardappel 9y ago
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.

rcarmo 9y ago

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.

Aardappel 9y ago
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).

WhitneyLand 9y ago

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

rcarmo 9y ago
Because there are still plenty of people (myself included) who prefer native apps. Thankfully :)
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Hard to make those multi-user.
  - rcarmo 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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).
- WhitneyLand 9y ago
  Downvote for wanting to know why? I assumed there are specific benefits rather than the the principle of it. In case in matters the reason I ask is usage scenarios. Even if I take notes at my laptop 95% of the time, using a phone once in a while when an idea comes is helpful.
Aardappel 9y ago
I started making this in.. 2007? Back then productivity apps on the web was in its infancy, and it certainly didn't appear as an option to me. And yes, I'm also guilty of using the tools I'm familiar with, as a predominantly C++ developer, I enjoy efficient things.

averagewall 9y ago

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.

fiatjaf 9y ago
Isn't something like a DAG doable by indenting in a text editor? Why not?
- infinite8s 9y ago
  Each tree node only has one parent, which is easy to indicate through the indentation structure. In a DAG a node can have multiple parents - I'm not sure how this can be modeled with indentation.
- didgeoridoo 9y ago
  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?
  - jlgaddis 9y ago
    Graphviz's "dot" language supports this.
    - taeric 9y ago
      I think the confusion is that it sounded like the idea was without repetition.
didgeoridoo 9y ago
Have you looked at the editor built right into OrientDB? http://orientdb.com/docs/2.0/orientdb-studio.wiki/Graph-Editor.html http://orientdb.com/docs/2.0/orientdb-studio.wiki/Graph-Edit...

jacquesm 9y ago

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 9y ago
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...
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > 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.

628C6l0 9y ago

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?

Aardappel 9y ago
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.

ArekDymalski 9y ago

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 ...

Aardappel 9y ago
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.

walterbell 9y ago

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.

rymohr 9y ago

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/

Aardappel 9y ago

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 :)

PeCaN 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Thanks! The main code base also gained localization support since your fork :)

evolve2k 9y ago

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.

arvinsim 9y ago

Can this export to org-mode format?