Twenty Years of TiddlyWiki (2024) | Hacker News Reader

Twenty Years of TiddlyWiki (2024)

tiddlywiki.com

27 pointsTomte12 comments

I recommend people to peruse GrokTiddlyWiki[0] which guides you through setting up TiddlyWiki as a personal knowledgebase similar to Obsidian and also implementing a spaced repetition system, it really is an exhaustive resource and it's true to its title. The author works at RemNote and is really passionate in general I'd say. He has his own digital garden called Mosaic Muse[2] built upon TiddlyWiki.

At the same time there is TiddlyPWA[1] which helps with syncing and some other stuff out of the box.

Now a theme you might be noticing is that there are distributions of TiddlyWiki and various ways to install and use it, it's similar to Emacs and Neovim in this regard.

That being said I was into it for a while and while it's great and even more flexible than most PKM software it takes a certain kind of tolerance for "jank" (as in eurogame jank) due to TiddlyWiki being a living system much more similar to Emacs, in that regard Obsidian and ZimWiki are practically related compared to TiddlyWiki. Because of this the sky and the time you're willing to put in are the limits for TiddlyWiki, it's one of the things where it can be both a canvas for your creativity and your second brain (or flavor of the month term for off-loading some cognitive burden to a system).

Also the community[3] is really helpful over on their forums, I encourage people to reach out if they need help because a bare TiddlyWiki is pretty confusing.

Oh and don't be worried about system lock-in or something like that, if you give it a try like I did it's easy to migrate[4] your notes/tiddlers afterwards.

To be clear, I went through a phase of trying different systems and org-mode for Emacs remains good enough albeit with its own troubles. Between them I prefer the mobile experience of TiddlyWiki but Emacs and respectively org-mode leads to easier and faster capture (of thoughts, bookmarks, todos).

[0] https://groktiddlywiki.com/read/

[1] https://tiddly.packett.cool/

[2] https://mosmu.se/

[3] https://talk.tiddlywiki.org/

[4] https://tiddlywiki.com/static/How%2520to%2520export%2520tidd...

Interesting, I didn't know Grok. Might have been useful when I came up with my own TiddlyWiki mix: https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/tiddlywiki_notes.html

Some really great tips in there, especially the ones about titling notes and not worrying about keeping everything perfect. I didn't know about Tiddloid, on Android I used the PWA version I mentioned earlier.

Also greek letters instead of numbers is pretty cool, I might start doing that too.

Sad that the Missing Manual-style book which was discussed back in the TW Classic days, or a nice cookbook, never came to pass. Good that's finally been taken care of with GrokTW.

Great, reliable, and extremely flexible tool, especially in non-permissive environments, either as a single file-only datadump, or decked-out to manage a flat-file KB via the "all-tiddlers-as-single-text-files" approach (either through TiddlyDesktop or one's own solution).

This is a great example of a killer app hobbled by the browser’s inability to save local data (to a file, not local storage) without horrid workarounds. I stopped using it because I couldn’t use any of the helpers and eventually lost data.

I had the same experience. In my humble opinion, it's just not the right tool for the task. I remember setting up my own self-hosted PouchDB to sync my notes with different clients. The tool was called NoteSelf¹. It was such a fragile setup and only worked suboptimally. Currently, I use Emacs Howm². Having notes in plain text files is the most robust and simple setup. I am a big fan of SQLite, but none of my attempts to use it for note storage were as good as a file-based solution.

¹ https://noteself.org/

² https://kaorahi.github.io/howm/

install rclone and run `rclone serve webdav .` to start a WebDAV server on the directory that contains your tiddlywiki file. easy and never had issues with saving that way.

At the time and environment I was working in, that was impossible.

I use TiddlyWiki every day as an interlinked combination of diary, Kanban board (via a plugin) and knowledge base. I'm not aware of any other tool which can do all this while being self-hosted and storing all its data as easily parseable text files in case it stops being developed.

That being said, its hackability and extensibility are hampered by being based on an incredibly crufty template/scripting language. I've never been able to do anything useful with it before running into limitations or bizarre behaviour and eventually giving up.

TiddlyWiki gave me a newfound pleasure in building on the web. I've created a second-brain and personal wiki system that I foresee using for another ten, possibly twenty years. There are few things as remarkable as TiddlyWiki out there … truly fascinating and powerful.

I used Tiddlywiki for years, never stopped liking it but eventually migrated to LogSeq which fit my note-taking style better. Looks like things have moved on since then though so I'll have to catch up on what's happening with it!

One of the greatest. Here's to at least 20 more!

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