@TW_Tones I think the misunderstanding might be that you’re thinking about creating a custom TW installation for a specific case, I am thinking about writing plugins that can be installed by anyone and minimising the risk they’ll mess things up somehow. In this context I:
- Can’t remove buttons from toolbar for a specific tiddler because it’s not supported in built-in layouts
- Can provide a different story tiddler cascade but it’s creates its own set of problems (duplicate code if I want those tiddlers to look the same, potentially not working well with alternate layouts, won’t follow updates to TW).
- Ditto for alternative editor
- Don’t think a plugin can overwrite built-in tiddlers and even if they can, it comes with another set of problems (similar to those from #2)
- Ditto for removing editing title
My bad I didn’t specify I am thinking about doing all of those things from the POV of a plugin.
I’d not call it hacking, those are tools I use almost daily with TW and while I suppose I might not fall under the umbrella of a casual user I am sure lots of people play with those. Or use various plugins and there is always a risk that another plugin does something weird.
Take my Task List plugin as an example. It has a single tiddler for the task list itself + whatever many tiddlers you create for each task. There are two situations where I had to resort to using JS:
- Renaming a Task List should update the reference to it in all Tasks that link to it
- Deleting a Task List should delete all the Tasks that link to it
#1 could be accomplished by using a tag but for whatever reason I really dislike doing so, or using field list instead of parent but I like the field names to be meaningful.
#2 requires JS
But then I am working on another plugin where for #1 I can’t use tags nor list field because I have a many-to-many relation and need to know which linked tiddler represents what and I’d rather not count on tag or list ordering to have that information (and that would seriously mess up/make impossible a lot of filters I use anyway).
Still, I wouldn’t say they cause me hiccups or a big problem – it’s just something I wish I could do without resorting to JS.