What's the standard way to not writing Title

#1

Sometimes we want to write tiddler quickly, so we might create a button with a random title:

<$button>
  <$action-createtiddler
    $basetitle=<<now "[UTC]YY-0MM-0DD0hh0mm0ssXXX">>
    $template="$:/state/mobile-imessage-layout/new"
    tags={{$:/plugins/linonetwo/mobile-imessage-layout/settings/TagsOnCreate}}
    type="text/vnd.tiddlywiki"
  >
</$button>

For example, in Design a Layout for Mobile

I think we should add a system tag to mark these tiddlers as “Titleless”, so when showing them in “Recent” list or search result, we know we should directly show the text field of them, instead of showing the random title.

Some plugin like stream [ Streams ] : future development will also create some titleless tiddler.

What about $:/tags/NoTitle
Or do you prefer using a field for this, like titleless: yes ?

2 Likes
Display the caption field instead of the tiddler title in story line
A Plugin to display and edit caption field
Why is TiddlyWiki Beaten by Obsidian?
How to let Link widget display caption or truncated text?
How to automatically name ChatGPT and Gemini conversations
Any alias solution that is actually... natural?
Expanding the is system namespace
Should caption be displayed as main title?
Health tracker plugin (buff & debuff tracker) as a layout (mini fullscreen app)
#2

What do you mean with this? How would Recent or search results “directly show the text field instead of the title”?

#3

Alternatvly if you dont rename tiddlers they have the prefix “New Tiddler” with a number following, or however your set the default.

Or are you thinking of something else

1 Like
#4

Hack the recent list so that it shows text instead of the title when a tiddler contains some flag or condition.

#5

I would suggest looking at this thread more as, “how to assist with programmatically generated titles”.

  • If the titles themselves can trigger a default behaviour eg have a suffix “auto” then you can use this to treat them differently. May be even use a cascade to change the title to text display as desired.
  • If not then at creation also set a “tag or field” that results in a different behaviour as needed.

One “standard way to not writing Title”, that I use, but is perhaps a different case is “the title is the text” I would have otherwise entered.

  • So rather than a tiddler named “HH:MM:SS” containing “some text I have no name for yet”
  • I just create an empty tiddler with the title “some text I have no name for yet”.
    • Although in practice it may also have a tag or field relating it to other tiddlers.
#6

We can add a cascade for it, for a plugin to modify it. Or we can adapt it in the core.

#7

This is acceptable I think, and somehow better than a random title! It clearly shows this tiddler is deliberately lacking the title.

1 Like
#8

I’m curious to see your final solution for this. Please share. :slight_smile:

#9

This whole issue of naming tiddlers is quite an interesting one, for many it seems a problem, for others not a problem, and others an art and we can’t seem to document it as a rational set of instructions, for all possible use cases.

  • Feel I have no outstanding issues with tiddler titles, across many example use cases and perhaps one day I will write and compile a guide.
  • I have shared alt-title, a tool to get one tiddler to masquerade as another in these forums.
#10

hmmm, We usually show the “caption” or the “description” field if titles have a special meaning. …

Captions and descriptions imo would fit, but the text of a tiddler usually has several lines. So I personally don’t want to show them in the recent tab or any other list instead of shorter titles.

So from my point of view this is a very specific usecase and should be a plugin.

If it is problematic for plugins to modify list-item-templates, I would suggest, that we improve that mechanism in the core. So every usecase can benefit from that improvement.

In TW the only thing which is needed to make a tiddler a thing is the “title”. So there will never be a tiddler without a title. So I think this tag would be confusing.

2 Likes
#11

IMO this thread is related to Need Help: List Item Template - Generate Reports and Making the list item template more hackable

#12

Some quickly-written-down tiddler note may not have title/caption/description , only a short text.

For overflowed text, they can be hidden using CSS I think. I hope this can be in the core, if we have conclusion about the Official way to decided if tiddler should just show its text in the list.

#13

I normally will write down a title. But I’m exploring a new usecase for mobile interface that requires fast write-down, and no time for a title!

User may filter the no-title-tiddler in the future, and readd the title, or organize these tiddlers.

#14

Will we have trouble on this, if it is very long? Or contains formatting like !! xxx ?

Fishing Plugin use long title as question of flash card, I will ask @oflg about this.

#15

What about risk for overwrites? Maybe a unique generated title is safer to use but hide it and show the content in its place?

#16

hmmm, That makes sense, but I would not use CSS to shorten the text. A regexp, that gets the first eg: 30 or 40 characters of a tiddler may work too and keep the DOM slim.

I personally would want to have it configurable. The Recent tab uses the “timeline-macro” which only shows the title of a tiddler.

It also is a really old macro. Everything is hardcoded and it uses a really “ugly” subfilter parameter. …

So it would make sense to give it some love.

#17
  • I have not come across a case when even a paragraph was too long.
  • The key limitation is no line breaks.
  • Yes punctuation can be restricted but you can write code that is tolerant, using """ as the outer delimiter but other plugins and solutions may not work well.
    • One approach is to have a process to move the title to the text and edit or generate a title later. After the note taking, a good time to review anyway.

If you have an edit-text field where you type a title into a temp location you can test this for existing tiddler titles and only show a save button if the title does not exist.

#18

Once we have conclusion on a standard, we can modify the core To use caption or parts of the text Instead.

I Come up with a standard today that we can use λ or ∮ as prefix. （like the $）

#19

Yes, i’m basically talking about generated title. We just need some metadata to know “it is generated” later.

And the code to get this metadata should be available in the core, So when we widely used this technique in the plugins. The Recent tab can still recognizing it.
And ensure we won’t use similar but different techniques in our different plugins.

#20

@linonetwo I think the matter of generated titles is a much bigger picture than the one you describe and I am not sure this needs any core changes, or standards.

However perhaps a De facto standard would be enough.

  • For example a tiddler with a created date exactly the same as the modified date, or a blank modified date would be a good indicator.
    • Timestamps are off, or $timestamp=no in action create tiddler.
  • You may even be able to store information after a date stamp value that the date formats ignore. eg created set to 1006065047721 generated or modified set to 1006065047721 new - the moment you modify it this is replaced.
  • Date tools still seem to interpret them correctly.

Now if you have a batch generation process you can ensure your new tiddler obey the de facto rule. Otherwise I recommend using the standard practices like a basetitle with increments; eg Project name Task, Project name Task 1, Project name Task 2