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TiddlyWiki — The open source non-linear notebook
TiddlyWiki is a free, open source tool for thought to capture, organize, and share complex information. Use it to take notes, keep your to-do list, outline an essay, or plan a novel. Record every thought that crosses your brain, or build a responsive website.
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Thanks for sharing Anne-Laure! Also, wanted to let you know how much I enjoy your newsletter.
Congrats! How would you say it compare (or not) to Roam? I know that @anthilemoon also wrote a pretty good review of Roam, for example. Thanks, Happy Friday from Africa and please stay safe!
@followflavius I made a side-by-side comparison, focusing specifically on how it compares with Roam features. So it doesn't include lots of the features TiddlyWiki has but Roam doesn't. I would say TiddlyWiki has 90% of Roam's features, but if the 10% that are missing are crucial to your workflow, you may need to tinker a bit to implement them.
@anthilemoon thanks very much! A key consideration is indeed open vs closed. I'm willing to sacrifice being in Roam's walled garden for the convenience it provides (Edward Snowden will cringe). Apologies for the non-related, I recall you mentioned about substack (which I went for, datajournalism.substack.com) that it keeps the "SEO juice", and I thought that was interesting as we are, hopefully, growing and perhaps publishing on a website at some point. Thank you so much and please stay safe
It's an excellent piece of software. It opens up many possibilities in terms of organizing not just thoughts and ideas, but raw data using special notes called data tiddlers, as well as code in the form of JS as well as markup and stylesheets. Everything is customizable and can be combined in different, interesting ways. It's really engrossing. I haven't been able to stop using it.
Not bad for something that was dismissed by some as merely a "toy"!
Great product! The list of supported platforms is really extensive. The app is useful to organise notes, plans or basically anything. It is especially cool to know that such high quality product is open source.
Thanks @bilevn, being open source was kind of an accident at the beginning but has been great for TiddlyWiki
Thanks @payrequest, I'm in awe of people who really can design beautiful sites. For TW5 I just wanted the main site to be a clean frame for the content, and mercilessly copied some of the designs I liked
For someone who is not a coder, but still with technical abilities, this is a super powerful tool to create applications. I use several TiddlyWikis - one for house holdmatters (shopping lists, product reference info, etc), one for notes and ideas including my book directory, and a few more. TiddlyWiki has been compared to Evernote and OneNote but it is just so much more flexible.
Exactly what I'm looking for! How does it compare to Roam Research? Same thing, just free?
@yarobagriy I think TiddlyWiki has 90% of Roam's features, but if the missing 10% are crucial to your workflow, you may need to tinker a bit to implement them.
@anthilemoon Awesome! Seems like the biggest thing I want is bi-directional linking, which looks like TiddlyWiki has :)
@jeremyruston It is a product I have unreservedly recommended for years. No I'm not just saying that. I'm a huge fan of yours simply because of tiddlywiki and I am very very glad to see that you are getting recognition. Your software works. It is clear, actually useful, and is something I can nerd out about and actually use features in. THANK YOU. Moreover thank you to the community that has helped it grow. I a very very busy humble attorney sometimes look at the icon and smile that there are decent developers out there who do not dumb down a program, yet make it easy to use. It is a fine balance that most people give up on to their own detriment. I may have used it dozens of times as an example, but I can neither confirm nor deny this.
Thanks for hunting this @anthilemoon and for writing about it in your wonderful newsletter! Thanks for building this masterpiece Jeremy!
I’m so excited to learn using this! Last time I’ve been as excited is when I discovered KeePass. Open Source is so great!!!
After installing TiddlyBlink and TiddlyMap I have just discovered the Kanban plugin, oh my god! Need to stop typing here now because TiddlyWiki is waiting for me :)
Thanks for the wonderful write-up Anne-Laure! I'm the original creator of TiddlyWiki. Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts.
@jeremyruston Hi Jeremy, this quote really inspired me:
"Much effort in contemporary user interface design is directed at persuading unwilling, busy people to complete simple transactions, ruthlessly reducing the cognitive load of the task to fit the capacity of the lowest common denominator user." is it your conviction that that is a mistake in software design? or do you think this principle only applies to a certain type of tools?
@samuelbeek a lot of software necessarily fits that description (most of Google's web development advice for example is predicated on this idea that every site has to be super fast otherwise buyers will go elsewhere, as if everyone was developing ecommerce sites). The mistake is to think that all software has to be like that. I was responding to a reaction I sometimes get about TiddlyWiki: that it is self-evidently too complicated, that it demands that users have a sophisticated conceptual model of whats going on. Which is true to a certain extent, but I'm trying to meet the needs of people who recognise that they face complex, intertwingled problems, and who are prepared to to invest intellectual effort in learning the tool. So I trust my users to be smart, thoughtful and busy.
@jeremyruston Thanks, this makes a lot of sense to me. And it seems like for software like yours, this is the right decision.
Hope to see this in more products, I feel like the mantra to make everything as easy as possible might limit us in some ways.
@samuelbeek @jeremyruston Any particularly useful or indispensable piece of software is usually non-trivial ;-)
I posted a couple of links with a bit of background about the project: an interview for the Changelog podcast https://changelog.com/196/ and a talk I gave with the late Joe Armstrong https://jermolene.com/intertwing...
Hmm, I forgot to proof what I stated before about development and themes.
So I will show you a little app I made for learning to code simple SVG graphics by hand:
SVG Playground is a single page TiddlyWiki – nothing more than one HTML file residing on a shared webserver. (If it loads slow for you: It’s hosted in central Europe.)
Looks different? Yes, because I dropped my own theme on it.
"If you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. – If you have TiddlyWiki, you can bolt together a new tool for every problem that comes your way."
Practical for getting things done. Very good backwards compatibility despite evolving constantly. It is way more than a wiki. Customization of functions is very open & easy. Can be used well by folk not familiar with Javascript. Ideal for developing custom Web page apps.
Its a Web page with intelligence. For over a decade TW has been evolving. It can be used straight out of the box (https://tiddlywiki.com) to start. Immensely flexible using its own macro language to expand function in any way you want. Very good support (via https://groups.google.com/forum/...). It is more than a wiki. It's more like a self-contained development environment.
Tiddlywiki is like a dream! You can do many many things with it! It is an ACTIVE TOOL not a passive one as you see in most other rival tools.
You can enjoy Tiddlywiki when you learn its wikitext scripting. It is simple and lets you to do amazing job!
You don't like the way Tiddlywiki process you notes, data, ... No problem, you can customize it! It is free world!
May be the below words describe Tiddlywiki in better way
From Eric Shulman: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/...
Many years ago I coined this phrase to explain TW:
"Own it like a document, Use it like a website"
Sometime I also use the following (just because I like alliteration):
"Powerful Portable Programmable Platform for People"
and, to promote my consulting services, I have this:
"Intuitive Interfaces for Intelligent Interactions" {registered trademark)
Tiddlywiki as a Tool for Making Presentation
You may use Powerpoint, LibreOffice Impress, Google Slides, Latex presentation,...
Or more advanced tools like HTML5+JS like reveal.js(https://revealjs.com/#/) or impress.js (https://impress.js.org/#/bored), ... for making presentation. But using these advanced tools are not easy for everyone ...
What do you think if with few clicks you can show your notes in Tiddlywiki as presentation in front of audiences. No other knowledge is required if you can take notes in Tiddlywiki (10 minutes to learn wikitext) by adding a tag you can turn it to a slide!!
See example Tiddlywiki here for presentation:
https://kookma.github.io/Tiddlys...
To give a try: 1. Click select for presentation, 2)click the first slide, 3) Click the slideshow button on the slide!
Tiddlywiki is extensible. A wealth of plugins is out there!
@jeremyruston created TiddlyWiki a long time ago. Its evolved into a diverse project. It is now a communal work of great power. The central idea is to use Javascript to deliver in ONE Web page anything you want a page to do. TW basic you can use immediately to make notes (https://tiddlywiki.com/) and find them. TW has enormous flex to build/tweak bespoke apps without needing understand Javascript as it has a high level macro language. ALL of that ability is in one Web page.
Thanks @tiddlytweeter I showed the first version of TiddlyWiki on 20th September 2004 -- there's a nice contemporary blog post here http://paulm.com/inchoate/2004/0...
Summer Bod 2020