What is it?

ProperTree is a cross-platform GUI plist editor written using Python (compatible with both 2.x and 3.x) and Tkinter.

Features

• Cross-platform - should work anywhere python and tkinter do
• Document-based to support multiple windows
• Node drag and drop to reorder
• Copy and paste
• Find/Replace - allows searching keys or values
• Ordered - or unordered - dictionary support
• Full undo-redo stack
• Backported support for binary property lists and unicode in python 2
• Expanded integer casting to allow for hex integers (eg. 0xFFFF) in xml <integer> tags
• Context-aware right-click menu that includes template info to OpenCore or Clover config.plist files
• OC (Clean) Snapshot to walk the contents of ACPI, Drivers, Kexts, and Tools for OpenCore config.plist files
• Value converter that supports Base64, Hex, Ascii, and Decimal

Getting ProperTree

Downloading The Repo As A ZIP File

On any system you can choose the Clone or download button, followed by the Download ZIP button to download the entire repo as a zip file (note, this does not allow you to update via git pull - any updates would require you to download the repo again in the same fashion).

Cloning The Repo Via Git

On *nix systems:

git clone https://github.com/corpnewt/ProperTree
python ./ProperTree/ProperTree.command

* On macOS, you can simply double-click the ProperTree.command after cloning to launch.

On Windows:

git clone https://github.com/corpnewt/ProperTree
./ProperTree/ProperTree.bat

FAQ

• How can I have ProperTree open when I double-click a .plist file?

  On macOS you can run buildapp.command located in ProperTree's Scripts directory to build an application bundle which can be associated with .plist files. While this approach works - it sometimes has odd issues when attempting to open multiple .plist files by double-clicking. Typically the first will work as normal, but opening any subsequent .plist file requires using the File -> Open menu.

  On Windows, you can run AssociatePlistFiles.bat located in ProperTree's Scripts directory to associate .plist files with ProperTree.bat, and also to add an Open with ProperTree option to the contextual menu when right-clicking .plist files. This approach is location-dependent, and moving your copy of ProperTree will require you re-run AssociatePlistFiles.bat.

• When I try to run ProperTree, I get [ModuleNotFoundError: No module name 'tkinter']

  That is because the graphical interface library that ProperTree depends on isn't present or cannot be detected, you need to install tkinter from your package manager.

  To install it on Ubuntu (and Ubuntu-based distros), you can run sudo apt-get install python3-tk -y

• ProperTree doesn't run because it doesn't have permissions, what gives?

  This shouldn't happen and it is recommended that you download only from the official ProperTree repository, but if you are confident about your source, then running chmod +x ProperTree.command should sort it out

• I use an international keyboard layout on macOS and some keys crash ProperTree with NSRangeException', reason: '-[__NSCFConstantString characterAtIndex:]: Range or index out of bounds

  This is a bug in the Cocoa implementation of Tcl/Tk on macOS (discussed here). The latest python 2 installer from python.org ships with, and uses Tcl/Tk 8.6.8 which has this issue fixed. Given that the shebang in ProperTree.command leverages #!/usr/bin/env python - the first python 2 binary found should be used. buildapp-python3.command from ProperTree's Scripts directory can be used to hardcode the first python3 path into the .app bundle's executable shebang.

• ProperTree crashes on Big Sur (macOS 11)

  This is due to the default python installs on macOS leveraging an older tk version - which lacks support for macOS 11. To solve this, you can download and install the latest python 3 version from https://www.python.org/downloads/mac-osx/ then leverage the buildapp-python3.command from ProperTree's Scripts directory to build a .app bundle that will leverage that python version.

  If you already have python 3 installed via brew or another package manager - it is likely still linking to the system tk version, which will still have issues unless linked against a newer version.