Daniel Brent Patton

Product Content Strategy & UX Writing

Treepad is a fantastic text editor with numerous additional features useful to writers and hackers and anyone else who needs to organize ascii. I use the freeware version (Treepad Lite). It’s a quick download, with a small footprint—you can run it off a floppy disk!—and it takes minutes to learn. The interface is organized around a split pane: the left side contains a hierarchy tree, the right side displays the contents of any selected node (a txt file, more or less). Navigate using the mouse or keyboard commands; add, delete, or move nodes; create hyperlinks between nodes; use the autopaste command to move the text equivalent of any content from any application directly into Treepad in one step; search a node or the entire tree; and export trees or txt files or (get this) even HTML!! I use Treepad for journaling and archiving, password storage, and for notes on current and future projects. If I had a complaint, it would be the lack of online Help (there is a manual), but what do you expect? A great value; check it out. Even consider moving up to a for-pay edition. They’ll thank you for it.