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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

How would TiddlyWiki write to filesystem (save) without a server?

I thought opening index.html in the browser was basically just a demo.

TiddlyWiki can replicate itself. All users can freely edit any TiddlyWiki and save their changes to their filesystem. There's a few options for exports.

It is a common gotcha that new users will lose some of their work while they learn persistence.

Tiddlywiki has two modes of running. In one, you simply save the file as HTML and all your content is saved inside the file.

The other mode is with a nodejs server (it's what I'm using). This allows me to access the wiki from all devices.

I see, so you make edits, the Javascript edits the html, therefore File -> Save Page will download an html file with your changes in it that you can open again.

I forget that File -> Save is even a thing for websites.

Note: The TiddlyWiki documentation explicitly advises that File -> Save Page does not work.

You have to click a save button in the app, and it will generate a valid copy. However, most users deploy some plugin or software which allows transparent auto-saving.

I used https://github.com/slaymaker1907/TW5-browser-nativesaver, that still works with the current version 5.3.8, though just in Chromium based browsers. You save the file once and from then on, as long as the tab is open, it autosaves itself.

That said, I advise against Tiddly Wiki, after using it for long. It has multiple bugs, which the author won't fix (e.g. div's inside p's), It has a cryptic syntax (e.g. code in attribute values), and tagging is not implemented in a way which makes a wiki scale (well, technically it is, tags can have tags). It is a thing where features are added but nothing outdated gets deprecated, so it is bloated. One will be more productive by using a folder with markdown files, and a browser add-on like Markdown Viewer.

My solution to a lot of issues is to use Tiddlywiki Classic. No divs inside p that I can find, less bloat (412 KB for a blank file instead of 2.5 MB), and it's still maintained. The main advantage, to me, is that it fits more tiddlers on screen at a time, which is the main point of TiddlyWiki for me; TW5 adds large amounts of spacing, borders, and large font sizes, which looks nicer but is less practical.

It's not perfect, though. Paragraphs are rendered by using two br tags, instead of p tags. Link syntax is the reverse of MediaWiki syntax; i.e. [[foo|bar]] links to "foo" in MediaWiki, but "bar" on TiddlyWiki, which trips me up constantly. There's other syntax awkwardness like sensitivity to spacing and newlines. Journals sort in alphabetical, not chronological order.

<https://classic.tiddlywiki.com/>

I don't know, for me it works, but I don't do anything fancy with it. I just put it on a server, so I can access it from all my devices. I don't even use tags, just tiddlers with sources which are other tiddlers or external web pages.

iirc browsers used to allow direct filesystem access.

They never did, if anything it's the opposite in that I think there are now APIs that can make this possible.

With TiddlyWiki you had to essentially File -> Save As and save the HTML back over itself. There were other ways too but they were all workarounds to the issue that browsers don't allow direct access.

They did back around 2008. I used Wiki on a stick - see https://stickwiki.sourceforge.net/which was kind of neat) but after a few years, Chrome etc stopped letting it save itself.

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