Cherrytree is an open source lightweight, fast, hierarchical note taking application available in Linux. There are very few note taking application present that represents your notes in a tree structure. It is such a versatile and powerful tool that offers wide range of features such as rich text, syntax highlighting, images handling, hyperlinks, import/export with support for multiple formats, support for multiple languages etc.
Cherrytree recently released 0.35.8 with improvements and numerous bug fixes. Visit the entire change log here.
Table of Contents
Cherrytree Feature Summary
- Rich text (foreground color, background color, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, small, h1, h2, h3, subscript, superscript, monospace)
- Syntax highlighting supporting several programming languages
- Images handling: insertion in the text, edit (resize/rotate), save as png file
- Embedded files handling: insertion in the text, save to disk
- Lists handling (bulleted, numbered, to-do and switch between them, multiline with shift+enter)
- Simple tables handling (cells with plain text), cut/copy/paste row, import/export as csv file
- Codeboxes handling: boxes of plain text (optionally with syntax highlighting) into rich text, import/export as text file
- Alignment of text, images, tables and codeboxes (left/center/right)
- Hyperlinks associated to text and images (links to webpages, links to nodes/nodes + anchors, links to files, links to folders)
- Spell check (using pygtkspellcheck and pyenchant)
- Intra application copy/paste: supported single images, single codeboxes, single tables and a compound selection of rich text, images, codeboxes and tables
- Cross application copy/paste (tested with libreoffice and gmail): supported single images, single codeboxes, single tables and a compound selection of rich text, images, codeboxes and tables
- Copying a list of files from the file manager and pasting in cherrytree will create a list of links to files, images are recognized and inserted in the text
- Print & save as pdf file of a selection / node / node and subnodes / the whole tree
- Export to html of a selection / node / node and subnodes / the whole tree
- Export to plain text of a selection / node / node and subnodes / the whole tree
- Toc generation for a node / node and subnodes / the whole tree, based on headers h1, h2 and h3
- Find a node, find in selected node, find in selected node and subnodes, find in all nodes
- Replace in nodes names, replace in selected node, replace in selected node and subnodes, replace in all nodes
- Iteration of the latest find, iteration of the latest replace, iteration of the latest applied text formatting
- Import from html file, import from folder of html files
- Import from plain text file, import from folder of plain text files
- import from basket, cherrytree, epim html, gnote, keepnote, keynote, knowit, mempad, notecase, tomboy, treepad lite, tuxcards, zim
- Export to cherrytree file of a selection / node / node and subnodes / the whole tree
- Password protection (using http://www.7-zip.org/) – NOTE: while a cherrytree password protected document is opened, an unprotected copy is extracted to a temporary folder of the filesystem; this copy is removed when you close cherrytree
- Tree nodes drag and drop
How to Install Cherrytree
Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, elementary
Installation via Terminal
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vincent-c/cherrytree
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install cherrytree
Run
- In Ubuntu and other debian based distributions, type Cherrytree in dash. Click the launcher icon.
- For Gnome, go to Applications -> Accessories -> Cherrytree

Links
- Website: Cherrytree
- Download for other Linux distributions: Download Page
- Source: Google Code
Troubleshooting and Support
If you face any issues while installing or using Cherrytree, you may drop a note using comment section at the end of this article, Or you can post your query in any of the support channels mentioned below.
- Online Forum: Cherrytree Forum
- Generic Ubuntu Forum: Ask Ubuntu
How to Uninstall/Remove Cherrytree
Via Terminal in Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, elementary
sudo apt-get remove cherrytree
Image Credits
Cherrytree