TiddlyWiki 5.1.23 | Hacker News Reader

TiddlyWiki 5.1.23

tiddlywiki.com

125 pointsBurningTreeC31 comments

I find fascinating how many folks, typically on the younger side, gravitate to proprietary (and expensive!) software like Roam Research and others, in search for personal knowledge management solutions, without seriously considering TW.

Coupled with the proper plugins, I find TW to be the most comprehensive, flexible and powerful solution, guaranteed to work 20 years from now, all self-contained in a single file. Seriously, how amazing is that when you think about it!

I talked to one of them recently, and he said it wasn't appealing because the name "wiki" sounded old school. Another beef was the use of JavaScript (yet, he'd find it cool if it were WASM. Go figure).

The only legitimate criticism he mentioned was the lack of efficient image/file embedding or linking, which I don't find much of an issue with the [img[<file>]] syntax, provided you are well organized. I keep dozens of images (mostly food recipes) linked that way on my site [0] with 107 tiddlers currently, extremely snappy, and properly cached and compressed with CloudFlare, all with no issues whatsoever. My personal TW file (combined personal and work) has over 2,000 tiddlers and I feel no difference.

Seriously, more people should give TW a try, just for a week or so, and see how can it change the way you retain, search and manage information.

[0] https://ramirosalas.com

I'm happy to see some of your TW work in the open. `/salute`.

Hi folks, tiddlywiki t.1.23 has been released today with many new features.

See them at https://tiddlywiki.com/#Releases

TiddlyWiki is a hackable, interactive, self-hosted web-notebook for all kinds of use-cases. I use it to keep track of my notes and todos.

Is there anybody else using it here on this platform?

best wishes, BTC

I estimate the majority of the people commenting, including me! I love it, I also use it for keeping track of notes and todo's in tandem with org-mode. with (setq outline-regexp "#") I hope to get the best of both worlds.

As far as I can tell, TiddlyWiki 5 has no feature or plugin to have revision history integrated into the UI, although one might come in the future [1]. According to [1], there used to be "TiddlyWeb/TiddlySpace, a robust serverside that supports revision history", but TiddlySpace (a hosted service) is dead, and TiddlyWeb (an open source codebase that I guess was the backend for TiddlySpace?) seems to be no longer maintained and mainly targeted the 'old' (pre-5.x) TiddlyWiki.

That's too bad for me, because I have a use case where I'd otherwise be very interested in using TiddlyWiki. I love that links load instantly, I love that forking a TiddlyWiki is trivial, I'm interested in the idea of dividing information into smaller-than-a-normal-wiki-page 'tiddlers', and I like the UI design. Overall, I can't find any other software that quite matches TiddlyWiki's capabilities.

But my use case is for a publicly editable wiki, so it's critical that revision history not only exist but be integrated into the UI. Right now, as far as I can tell, the closest approximation would be to use TiddlyWiki's feature of auto-saving to a Git hosting service (which for some reason supports only specific hosting services, not arbitrary remotes?). Then you could browse the history on that service. But that would be a totally separate site from the wiki itself, which would create an awkward user experience.

[1] https://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5/issues/436#issuecom...

If you need this so much, you can just use TiddlyWiki 4.

You could use the node tiddlywiki which saves the tiddlers in separate files, you could also use the markdown plugin and the tiddlers are saved in seperate markdown files. Perhaps as service could do a git commit with each file change in the background, perhaps saving the browserstring and ip address with it. You could make a seperate page - for example Gitlab with the commit history.

Try checking the file into GitLab (or GitHub) pages. It’s just an HTML5 file. Use pull requests to manage changes. Use the git repo as your history.

In the 2005-2009 timeframe I served a TiddlyWiki from PTC Windchill as a project website for my team. Windchill provided the access, change history & configuration management layer.

It's hard to find a good solution since the main Tiddlywiki is built as a single-user rather than multi-user solution. But these two tools may help now or in the future since they are being developed. (I can't definitively answer since I'm not super familiar with either).

There's a Noteself setup of Tiddlywiki (https://noteself.org/) that syncs with a database and has revision history. You click on the upper right corner of a tiddler to access revision history. The revision UI's not very intuitive to start and I'm not sure how making a public site with revision history available would work though. It also is on version 5.1.21 rather than 5.1.23 of Tiddlywiki, though maybe the maker plans to upgrade in the future. You could ask here https://forum.noteself.org. I just started using it so I'm not super familiar with it.

TW5 Bob https://github.com/OokTech/TW5-Bob is being built to serve one or more Wikis for multiple people, but I don't know that they have revision history (I could be mistaken).

There is a plug-in for revisions [0], but it may be too simple for your needs?

[0] http://j.d.revisions.tiddlyspot.com/

I recommend checking out TiddlyWiki Desktop as a mechanism for managing lots of wikis. I save my files to iCloud and sync that way between devices. I us Quine2 on the iPhone to open the files there. Also worth checking out Anne-Laure Le Cunff's article on how to set up a digital garden using TiddlyWiki and some TW plugins. https://nesslabs.com/digital-garden-set-up

It has been so long since I've used TW. But It makes me so happy that this project is still chugging along.

What's the best way to persist state with TiddlyWiki? I really would like to save without any browser extensions.

I use the npm package and run it as a local server. Works well.

If you aren't tied strictly to using pure TiddlyWiki you may be interested in NoteSelf(https://noteself.org/), which uses the browser's LocalStorage via PouchDB. Bonus, this can then be synchronized to any remote couchdb server.

This came out a while ago and I remember thinking it'd make the single file approach to TiddlyWiki effectively frictionless if you are Chrome user ...

https://web.dev/file-system-access/

I've found setting up the Git integration to be the best way: https://tiddlywiki.com/static/Saving%2520to%2520a%2520Git%25...

I tried this but found it kind of confusing. How do you actually edit your wiki? As far as I can tell, when I make changes the wiki "saves" by making a new commit and pushing it to GitHub, but it doesn't modify the file itself. Meaning in order to update my local copy, I have to manually pull the changes down from GitHub every time. This seemed extremely awkward to me and I'm sure I'm missing something or doing something wrong

1. It is confusing. I agree with you there.

2. Nope, the file is modified itself.

3. One thing that the documentation does a poor job of: all fields need to be filled out for GitHub integration.

4. Here's my settings in TiddlyWiki: https://i.imgur.com/MqbO28t.png

i started using a spin-off of TW about 15 years ago (monkeygtd) and it was awesome for project management. started using TW again a few weeks ago, i was really glad to see it’s still under active development! trying to decide between that and org-mode now, but TW is definitely a good solution for those looking for a personal wiki

[My page on notetaking](https://maya.land/notetaking/) links to [a thing I wrote on my TW setup](https://lesser.occult.institute/an-opinionated-approach-to-t...) if anyone is interested in seeing a particular setup.

Happy to see the project is still evolving!

Was a happy user of TiddlyWiki 5+ years ago but eventually left when adding too many pictures made that HTML file so bloated it could barely open.

Are there any workarounds for this now in the community? Can I add various files / pics to the wiki and not worry about it bloating? Would appreciate insights on this.

(Meanwhile switched to a set of Markdown-driven directories in a cloud.)

(Edit: first line, grammar.)

There is lazy-loading now you can use with the server edition, but I don't like either that they're still served out as base64 embedded content. I suspect the most elegant solution is to have your images live hosted somewhere else, and just add references to them.

Tiddlywiki is an incredible tool/framework, and the community is very active and supportive [0]. To get an idea of how flexible it is, see the unofficial list of examples and plug-ins (featuring hundreds of categorized entries): https://dynalist.io/d/zUP-nIWu2FFoXH-oM7L7d9DM

[0] https://groups.google.com/g/tiddlywiki

https://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5

> the JSZip Plugin with the ability to dynamically create Zip files, and thus to conveniently build multi-file static sites within the browser

How cool is dat!?

I'm using the same techniques in my client-side epub generator.

Tiddlywiki has been my digital brain for 5 years! It’s infinitely hackable and I haven’t found a better system.

It says it has different methods of storing data. What are those methods?

You can have a look at https://tiddlywiki.com/#Saving and check your operating system on the left to show a list of possible saving methods

If you have further questions, there's a very helpful community at https://groups.google.com/g/tiddlywiki

Am I the only one who misread the name on first glance?

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