The initial things that drew me to TiddlyWiki are still covered in this post, and still basically true.
I still love using TW, and it’s still my main personal notetaking software. Since this post, I have gone through at least 3 cycles of feeling further charmed by it, after discovering it had some additional functionality that I didn’t know it surfaced (ex: the ctrl-E “Excise & Transclude” shortcut, easy palette-swapping, changing the journal datetime format, Github saving, easy export to JSON). I’ve only run into 1 new point of disappointment: its multi-person editing inadequacies.
It has a really good hackability philosophy. TW seems to surface everything it possibly can to deliberate modification, and then tries to make modifying it easy. The software is hackable, old, and a decent number of programmers like it, so the add-on ecosystem is pretty informal but really great.
(Unfortunately, I can’t compare it with Roam’s current ecosystem, because I haven’t tried Roam recently. My fuzzy and weakly-held impression is that TW leans harder towards amazing self-contained functionalities, personalization, and a culture of casual hacking & sharing. While Roam seems better with chrome extensions, the external-facing APIs of other software, and being intuitive to use for non-programmers. I am curious what other people’s impressions are.)
Between satisfaction with TW’s basic offerings, and a good add-on environment, I have basically gone from “trying new notetaking software all the time,” to “notetaking-monogamous for 2+ years.”
Notably, my typical response to finding something else that I want my notes to do has changed from “finding a new software suite,” to “sketching what I want as a spec, then hunting for an TW add-on or function that does that thing.” In some rare cases, I’ve even written basic implementations myself. The software has done a fabulous job of rising to my growing demands of it.
(To give some idea of the diversity of things out there: There’s a TW GTD implementation, Roam-inspired TW variant, TW slide shows, calendar things, timers, several varieties of TW as a code-highlighter (ex: codemirror), some flashcard things, graphs… this list is long. A few TW environments or add-ons barely resemble their starting point in anything but philosophy, and might qualify as full-blown web-apps.)
So, a new thing I recognize as very valuable, if you want a system to grow with you: A good add-on ecosystem!
This thing wasn’t in my old list of desirables, but I wish it was: I feel horrified in retrospect that I ever put up with a knowledge-base software that didn’t have transclude or lists-from-tag-filters baked in. It saves me a lot of time and frustration to have large chunks of my overview notes use pointers to update themselves.
Something TW isn’t good at: With TW, it doesn’t look like I can set it up so that 2 people can modify the same file at once. I ended up settling for Github merges. It looks like a few people have gotten part of the way to making this dream work, but there is a lot of set-up required to run it, and it doesn’t seem to be able to do this yet anyway. (This difficulty is a serious drawback of the self-contained single-file philosophy TW has.)
It has been about a year, so here’s an update.
The initial things that drew me to TiddlyWiki are still covered in this post, and still basically true.
I still love using TW, and it’s still my main personal notetaking software. Since this post, I have gone through at least 3 cycles of feeling further charmed by it, after discovering it had some additional functionality that I didn’t know it surfaced (ex: the ctrl-E “Excise & Transclude” shortcut, easy palette-swapping, changing the journal datetime format, Github saving, easy export to JSON). I’ve only run into 1 new point of disappointment: its multi-person editing inadequacies.
It has a really good hackability philosophy. TW seems to surface everything it possibly can to deliberate modification, and then tries to make modifying it easy. The software is hackable, old, and a decent number of programmers like it, so the add-on ecosystem is pretty informal but really great.
(Unfortunately, I can’t compare it with Roam’s current ecosystem, because I haven’t tried Roam recently. My fuzzy and weakly-held impression is that TW leans harder towards amazing self-contained functionalities, personalization, and a culture of casual hacking & sharing. While Roam seems better with chrome extensions, the external-facing APIs of other software, and being intuitive to use for non-programmers. I am curious what other people’s impressions are.)
Between satisfaction with TW’s basic offerings, and a good add-on environment, I have basically gone from “trying new notetaking software all the time,” to “notetaking-monogamous for 2+ years.”
Notably, my typical response to finding something else that I want my notes to do has changed from “finding a new software suite,” to “sketching what I want as a spec, then hunting for an TW add-on or function that does that thing.” In some rare cases, I’ve even written basic implementations myself. The software has done a fabulous job of rising to my growing demands of it.
(To give some idea of the diversity of things out there: There’s a TW GTD implementation, Roam-inspired TW variant, TW slide shows, calendar things, timers, several varieties of TW as a code-highlighter (ex: codemirror), some flashcard things, graphs… this list is long. A few TW environments or add-ons barely resemble their starting point in anything but philosophy, and might qualify as full-blown web-apps.)
So, a new thing I recognize as very valuable, if you want a system to grow with you: A good add-on ecosystem!
This thing wasn’t in my old list of desirables, but I wish it was: I feel horrified in retrospect that I ever put up with a knowledge-base software that didn’t have transclude or lists-from-tag-filters baked in. It saves me a lot of time and frustration to have large chunks of my overview notes use pointers to update themselves.
Something TW isn’t good at: With TW, it doesn’t look like I can set it up so that 2 people can modify the same file at once. I ended up settling for Github merges. It looks like a few people have gotten part of the way to making this dream work, but there is a lot of set-up required to run it, and it doesn’t seem to be able to do this yet anyway. (This difficulty is a serious drawback of the self-contained single-file philosophy TW has.)