FeatherWiki: A lightweight tiddlywiki alternative (63 kilobytes)

#1

Hi all,

FeatherWiki (https://feather.wiki/ - no affiliation) is a lightweight (very fast!), self-contained wiki that seems like a simplified version of TiddlyWiki. The empty file is just ~63 kilobyte. Of course, it lacks many of the features in TiddlyWiki, but it is still interesting software. Discussion on HackerNews: Feather Wiki: app for creating personal non-linear notebooks, databases, wikis | Hacker News

Of note, there are six different editions (with bird names according to size!) including various text editors (WYSIWYG, markdown) and browser compatibility: Feather Wiki

Best,
Anders

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#2

Thanks Anjar,

Very interesting, I took a brief look, I am already very heavily invested in TiddlyWiki but I when I have occasion to recommend it to friends who might struggle with TiddlyWiki this simpler set up might be a good fall back to recommend.

I did not spot any notes on import export - which might be a minus for folks using FeatherWiki who want to import from Tiddywiki - for instance I might want to share tiddlers with friends using FeatherWiki.

Thanks for sharing that.

#3

I wrote on Hacker News …

It is interesting. Obviously inspired by TiddlyWiki (https://tiddlywiki.com), itself inspired by Ward Cunningham.

The issue is “features” – it is a bit of a one-legged-duck.

It’s lightweight is brill. It’s expandability somewhat mute.

#4

63k yet it has WYSIWIG! Why can’t we have WYSIWIG? I mean built in or available as an official plugin.

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#5

No search???

2 Likes
#6

Buggy. I only had to make one page with no contents. After that I couldn’t save any page or navigate back to other pages or do anything at all. This was with “chickadee” version. Maybe there was corruption during download (there was difficulty downloading).

Edit: Putting in a long image pushes the “Edit” button offscreen. The entire display area is not bounded by the dimensions of the physical screen.

Edit 2: Markdown sentences that start with asterisks ** are run together with prior sentences even if there are blank lines in between. Need to use underlines __ . So markdown seems slightly off.

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#7

Way back when, I had talked about wanting a lightweight version of TiddlyWiki that was just a tiddler editor.

Something like FeatherWiki is exactly what I would like as a TiddlyWiki sidekick. A version of this that uses TiddlyWiki syntax for formatting, and allows dragging Tiddlers from this tiny sidekick to a full-fledged TiddlyWiki.

So if somebody has the chops to create FeatherWiki-like TiddlyWiki alternatives, that would be frigging awesome.

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#8

Interoperation between tools is cool. In case it’s useful, I wrote up some docs a few months ago for how to drag tiddlers from a non-TiddlyWiki web page across to a TiddlyWiki instance:

https://tiddlywiki.com/dev/#TiddlyWiki%20Drag%20and%20Drop%20Interoperability

6 Likes
#9

Yup, Feather Wiki as my TiddlyWiki sidekick looks promising.

No need for anybody to build a FeatherWiki-like version of TiddlyWiki.

I just need to create a cleanup mechanism to get rid of the incoming “fat”.

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#10

The idea of building a TiddlyWiki style app from off the shelf components is really interesting I think. For Feather Wiki, a lot of the functionality is handled by its three dependencies, the pell (wysiwyg) , snarkdown (markdown), and choo (app framework) npm packages.

Ps, I’m pleased to announce there is now support for Feather Wiki on https://tiddlyhost.com/ . If you click “Show advanced settings” when creating a site you’ll see Feather Wiki as an option. If you’re interested in using Feather Wiki on Tiddlyhost please give it try there and report any bugs you find.

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#11

Maybe somebody with real experience can chime in. Not just technical know-how, but proper terminology.

I’m thinking WYSIWYG and simultaneous widget-rendering/filtering/transclusions would never play nice together.

Then again, if the WYSIWYG editor ignored things like widget-rendering/filtering/transclusions ???

All of that aside, I would love official WYSIWYG in TiddlyWiki. I have a hard time dealing with markup/wikitext in one panel and rendering in a side panel. (One of the reasons I find Google Groups cognitively easier to work with: WYSIWYG. All the warts being the side cost …)

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#12

That’s what I was thinking. It would be unreasonable to ask for widgets and WYSIWIG in the same tiddler.

#13

That was the gist of the idea behind the typewriter demo I posted some time ago: https://groups.google.com/g/tiddlywiki/c/qmIgTgn6nOc/m/GNhZMRHbAAAJ

It did not get much community buy in or interest, therefore further development has been private and for a small target audience that has been happily using it on a near daily basis for well over a year.

Even the challenge of widgets, macros and transclusions is surmountable given the necessary resources to support the work. @linonetwo is doing great work in this area, though the reactjs dependency is unfortunate.

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#14

Really, all it’s importing is the html of the rendered text. Which can be very messy to clean up and difficult to edit without WYSIWIG.

A different approach is to use an extension like “copycat” that can copy selected text as markdown. Then you can paste either directly or into a new tiddler, change the type to markdown (with the official md plugin), and you’ll have your contents as easy-to-edit MD, rather than HTML. The steps involved aren’t any more than the steps in the video clip.

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#15

It looked like it might be a fun alternative to TW. But it’s really too fragile. Second day, broke it just by using it. I think it starts when you attempt to save an empty topic. Why can’t you save an empty topic? I don’t like it when an app makes me memorize rules to prevent serious bugs.

#16

I agree. It ain’t intuitive because it’s basics are off kilter. Nice idea. Poor reality. FALTERS too much.

Just saying. TT.

#17

Remember that it was released a week ago.

#18

You are right! And glad you assist It.

#19

That is absolutely possible, Obsidian can do that, and I find there can be improment to the ob’s way, so I design it in How to deal with wikitext like widget, macro in WYSIWYG editor?

And my part-time dev time is limited, so I choose to write it based on reactjs, which makes it impossible to be lightweight, @saqimtiaz but I think it is OK, because I use my 100MB TidGi desktop app everyday…Size is not the case on a desktop app.

And when publishing my wiki to github pages blog platform, I will automatically remove all unnecessary plugins, makes my blog lightweight enough for my readers.

This is how I make my wiki powerful on local, and relatively lightweight when online.

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#20

I completely understand and your approach makes sense.

More than the size I have concerns about how well and how cleanly React will integrate into TW in the long term. However, the work you are doing at the moment is invaluable and it can always inform a potential future version without the React dependency.

The only real barrier to implementing a native WYSIWYG in TiddlyWiki has been a scarcity of time and resources.

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