Welcome to the TreeSheets productivity tool!
TreeSheets is a "hierarchical spreadsheet" that is a great replacement for spreadsheets, mind mappers, outliners, PIMs, text editors and small databases.
Suitable for any kind of data organization, such as todo lists, calendars, project management, brainstorming, organizing ideas, planning, requirements gathering, presentation of information, etc.
It's like a spreadsheet, immediately familiar, but much more suitable for complex data because it's hierarchical.
It's like a mind mapper, but more organized and compact.
It's like an outliner, but in more than one dimension.
It's like a text editor, but with structure.
Community
If you like, you are kindly invited to join the Discord channel and
the Google group for discussion. The community maintains a wiki on this GitHub page.
Installation
Pre-built binaries for Windows, macOS and Linux are available at the
Release section.
On macOS, drag TreeSheets from the disk image into your Applications folder. The app is not signed
with an Apple Developer ID, so macOS blocks it when you first open it. On macOS 15 and later,
try to open it once, then go to System Settings > Privacy & Security and click "Open Anyway". On older
versions, right-click the app, choose Open, and confirm. Alternatively, run
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/TreeSheets.app in Terminal. You only need to do this once.
For Linux, there are packages for Debian-based distributions and AppImages (x86_64 and aarch64) that run on
most other distributions. To use an AppImage, download it, make it executable
(chmod +x TreeSheets-*.AppImage) and start it.
Both are built on Ubuntu 22.04, so they need a distribution of about the same age or newer. The Debian packages could also be
installed on other Debian-based distributions, depending on whether the required dependency packages are available.
If you use Flatpak, you can install TreeSheets from Flathub.
Source Code
This repository contains all the files needed to build TreeSheets for various platforms.
License
TreeSheets has been licensed under the ZLIB license (see ZLIB_LICENSE.txt).
Structure
src contains all source code. The code is dense, terse, and with few comments, typical for a codebase that was never
intended to be used by more than one person (me). On the positive side, you'll find the code very small and simple,
with all functionality easy to find and only in one place (no copy pasting or over-engineering). Enjoy.
TS is the folder that contains all user-facing files, typically the build process results in an executable to be put
in the root of this folder, and distributing to users is then a matter of giving them this folder.
.claude/skills/treesheets-agent is a skill that lets Claude Code inspect and script the document open in a
running TreeSheets, see TS/docs/AGENT_SOCKET.md. Outside this repository, you can install it as a plugin:
/plugin marketplace add aardappel/treesheets
/plugin install treesheets@treesheets
Claude Code doesn't auto-update plugins from third-party marketplaces by default. To get new versions of the
skill automatically, enable it under /plugin → Marketplaces → treesheets → Enable auto-update.
Ideas for future features and known bugs are tracked in the issues.
Building
This project uses CMake to enable compilation on various platforms and CPack on top of it to package the produced binaries. The build, installation and packaging instructions are within CMakeLists.txt.
If you're comfortable with a C++ compiler and CMake, these steps will get you a working build of TreeSheets:
- Clone this repository
git clone https://github.com/aardappel/treesheets
- Change the working directory to the working tree
cd treesheets
- Configure the build system
cmake -S . -B _build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
On Windows ARM this needs the Visual Studio C++ compiler.
With a Visual Studio generator, open _build/TreeSheets.sln after configuring and select
Debug or Release in the IDE. Accept project reloads when CMake regenerates the solution.
- Build and package for binary distribution
cmake --build _build --target package -j
| Platform | Result |
|---|
| Windows | A ZIP archive for portable usage and an installer |
| macOS | A disk image for Drag and Drop installation |
| Linux | A binary Debian package |
Alternatively, to only build without packaging:
cmake --build _build -j
On Windows, append --config Release.
- Install (optional)
cmake --install _build
- macOS: append
--prefix <directory> to specify another installation root for the bundle.
- Linux: usually requires root privileges, e.g. run this command with
sudo.
If you do not have wxWidgets installed separately (e.g. as shared library on your distribution or operating system) or want to build it within the TreeSheets CMake project as a static library anyway, add -DTREESHEETS_BUNDLE_WXWIDGETS=ON to the build configuration. This builds wxWidgets from source with wxBUILD_SHARED and wxBUILD_INSTALL set to off, even if an installed wxWidgets is found, so that the wxWidgets libraries are statically linked into TreeSheets and no additional wxWidgets files get installed.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
