Scrunch Edit

A two-pane outliner for Markdown and org files.

Often a text editor is more than enough to handle even long, complex documents. But past a certain point it gets hard to navigate the structure. This is where outliners come in. It's just that most outliners use their own file formats, and have poor or non-existent support for import and export. We can do better.

Screenshot of Scrunch Edit (112K)

Scrunch Edit is a two-pane outliner with as many main goals:

• support popular markup formats such as Org Mode and Markdown;
• fit in a single file, to be easily copied and modified.

It otherwise acts much like a simple text editor.

Uses

• Keep many small text files in one to save disk space and directory entries.
• Interoperate with applications like Emacs and Orgzly.

Download

This archive contains Scrunch Edit TT, a new port that enables easy bundling. It hasn't been tested as much as previous versions. Please back up your data.

Source code archive (10K)

As of 6 October 2023, version 2.6 comes with better file dialogs on Linux and the new Prefix Lines command. See also:

Linux/Windows builds

public repository

Scrunch Edit is open source under the MIT license. The user interface should be fairly obvious. See the usage notes below.

System requirements

Running Scrunch Edit TT from source requires Tcl/Tk 8.6 with Tklib. Both are available on most Linux distributions, or else from the tcl-lang.org website.

Recommended screen resolution: 800x600.

Usage notes

Scrunch Edit guesses formats based on file extensions. There's no other way short of separate "open" commands, since the same text file can be interpreted in different ways based on context.

• The preface is any text that comes before the first heading, in Org Mode parlance. That's unusual in Markdown, but you can still have one.
• If you add sections while a search is active, Find Again will skip them.

While an effort has been made to provide key combos for most functions, Scrunch Edit is best used with mouse and keyboard together.

Credits and support

Scrunch Edit is based on knowledge gained from TkDocs.com; it borrows much from an older project:

OutNoted, an outline note-taking editor

You can usually find me on IRC:

#ctrl-c channel of tilde.chat

or else on Mastodon:

No Time To Play on elekk.xyz

Would love to hear from you.

Old Python edition

This was the "real" Scrunch Edit until 25 December 2022.

Scrunch Edit v2.5 (27K)

See also:

old project news

old read-me file

This edition requires a Python runtime. Python comes preinstalled on the Mac and most Linux distributions; Windows users can get it from the python.org website. You'll also need the Tkinter module, which is bundled with most Windows runtimes and preinstalled on the Mac. On Linux you might need to add it yourself: look in your package manager for something called "tkinter", "python-tk" or the like.

Python version 3.x is preferred, but 2.7 should work as well.

More small things