Widdler is a single binary that serves up TiddlyWikis | Hacker News Reader

Widdler is a single binary that serves up TiddlyWikis

github.com

198 pointsTomte49 comments

Wow, that is just 357 lines of Go code. So much of my work life is using complex systems in AWS and GCP that are beyond my ability to understand “turtles all the way down.” It is refreshing to see something so simple and focused on one thing. In the early days of Ruby on Rails, I had the source code to Ruby and for Ruby on Rails on my laptop and it was all fairly readable. Those days are long gone.

Like using the command line, its all so flexible, dynamic and powerful while being small and understandable. It was possibly my favourite part of learning to use Linux 20 years ago.

Does that LOC count include dependencies?

If you want to make something from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Anyway, I wouldn't count the kind of simple, focused libraries dependencies Widdler relies on as additional LOC.

As a rule of thumb, if it's something that wouldn't make me blink an eye if I found it was in the python stdlib, it gets a pass from me. Only the webdav library might not fit this.

This is subjective, of course. If anyone has a better heuristic for this, I'm all ears.

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” - Carl Sagan.

There are only native packages + 1 external packages suah.dev/protect.

Looks like the package in question only has packages from the Go project itself.

The only external dependency is OpenBSD specific and used on that operating system only.

It's a weird phenomenon though since even though ruby on rails was readible in a small code base, it was still building on top of a ton of abstractions that hid lower detail. It makes me think that we're just failing to build clean good abstractions that make coding for cloud as beautiful as it could be.

The difference between Rails and AWS however is that you can inspect the former and understand all its underpinnings whereas AWS is almost entirely proprietary and your experience with their services entirely depends on what services you select.

The trick seems to be that all the complexity is in the html file and runs in the browser. The server is just a basic WebDAV server.

It looks like the entire wiki implementation is copied to a new file when you create a new wiki page. It's a 2.3 MB file, which seems like a lot to download when you visit a new page.

Each HTML file is a complete wiki instance. The wiki code and data for all pages within the wiki are bundled in that file. The code let’s the webpage edit itself.

I don't get it. Why is it making me compile a Go webserver then? There aren't even binaries provided.

So you can save the modified file on the server.

> It's a 2.3 MB file, which seems like a lot to download when you visit a new page.

It is, But I feel it's still better than what ever framework they're using nowadays to generate doc/wiki for APIs which hijacks Ctrl-F with a useless pop-up which rarely gets me what I need[1]. Please bring back plain HTML document pages.

[1] https://stripe.com/docs/api

i keep the code for CPython, Go, terraform and the terraform providers i use checked out. It is still useful and educational to read source code. i confess i only rarely check out the kernel or glibc code. kernel code is good but usually not the issue glibc has the tendency to make me mad.

That really seems like a lot of code just to do the job of cp.

Perhaps their time would be better spent thinking up some way to prevent a TiddlyWiki from becoming a wormable nightmare.

Na, cp doesn’t cut it :p - if it was that trivial of a task I wouldn’t have taken the time to write it!

Thanks for your opinion on where my time is better spent though, I don’t know what I was thinking.. building a tool to solve a problem I had and releasing it completely free of charge! I’ll know better next time!

A propos the single binary wiki server. Last time I was looking for something of this kind, I stumbled upon Fossil SCM, which also includes an implementation of Wiki [1].

Editing can be done in Markdown, all version-controlled, there's user support built-in, the whole thing basically resides in a repository, which is a kind of a SQLite db. The wikis can be imported from text files too.

It may be not fancy-looking, but for "note-taking" can be good enough. I guess it may be made to run in Tmux or the likes to have a Wiki served locally to the smartphone.

Wish the Fossil was more templatable, also there's no proper wiki category tagging, but it does work for the purpose.

[1]: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/wikitheory.wiki

By the authors of Sqlite. High quality code that is probably going to be around and well maintained for long. Not unimportant when using it as a personal knowledge system.

This is AWESOME! My biggest annoyance with TiddlyWiki has been the ergonomics of saving.

I've been using TiddlyDesktop, but that thing has some questionable privacy because it's based on Chromium. One time, I had it running in the background while working on something completely unrelated, and I got a Chrome-style popup/alert warning me about a network printer being disconnected. I didn't even have Chrome installed on my machine at the time and it took me a while to realize that it came from TiddlyDesktop.

But besides the privacy issues, TiddlyDesktop only serves local wikis. That's annoying when you have multiple devices.

Also, pro-tip if you're on Ubuntu: the latest golang version in the default repos isn't compatible with this. You'll need to use golang 1.16 or later, which can be installed manually from the website, or installed via apt with a custom PPA (https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/Ubuntu)

I find the TiddlyDesktop to be too heavy for what can be done in the browser itself. Have you tried using Timmi [0] with your browser [1, 2]? I had problems initially with the file save workflow till I found Timmi. I use it with Firefox and sync with Dropbox. It hasn't failed me and works smoothly.

Timimi is a web-extension accompanied by a native host that allows you to save and backup your standalone HTML tiddlywiki files anywhere in your hard-drive. Once installed, you can save the tiddlywiki files without any extra steps, like the original Tiddlyfox addon.

Timimi also provides users with 4 backup strategies, viz:

- Create a backup Every nth save

- Create a backup every nth minute

- Customised Tower of Hanoi

- First in First Out [3]

[0] https://ibnishak.github.io/Timimi/

[1] Chrome/Edge/Brave: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/timimi/mnggafnmmhd...

[2] Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/timimi/

[3] https://tiddlywiki.com/static/Timimi%253A%2520WebExtension%2...