This is more a stream of consciousness post. Think of it like a tiddler/journal entry.
I’ve been using TiddlyWiki for well over 20 years now. I use it every day. I also work at a place that is very tight on how information is managed on my daily work machine.
I discovered that TW was a perfect solution for my work notes because it was a full wiki with excellent features, filtering, macros, and a philosophy of brain dumps (tiddlers). Best was that it is a single page web app that runs in my main daily app the web browser (pinned tab). Having a Node service running allows me auto-saving and file backup options.
However, almost every month or so I see company slack messages asking what productivity note taking apps are we allowed to use due to our restrictions on installing 3rd party applications to the operating systems. And I dutifully reply the advantages of using TiddlyWiki for that exact purpose.
Oddly when I do I typically get blank stares or even push back because TW is not Obsidian or Notion. As if there was something about TW that offends them despite its philosophy of design fitting the purpose better then those others that need special permission to install.
There is enough propaganda on the use of things like Obsidian that it even gets mentioned on company approval lists. It bothers me that these 3rd party tools seem to get all the attention when customized self driven solutions like TW are snubbed at or ignored.
Is this a flaw in TW itself? Is there something about having a personalized solution to a problem that makes it invalid as a solution? Why doesn’t TW ever get more recognition for the amazing tool that it is?
It is hard sometimes competing with reduced functionality or commercially advertised products.
Personally I think calling it the “tiddlywiki platform” lifts it higher and more seriously. It also suggests it’s what you build on top of. I also think pointing out it’s open source, with a strong community.
To be honest I am not sure you should take too much notice of people who only want cool, I found “a non-linear personal web notebook” cool, but then I am a people who try and be cool often follow fashion’s and can be fickle, quickly moving to the next thing.
if you need tiddlywiki in a professional situation perhaps actually force a real evaluation using facts not feelings to support choices.
While TW is very convenient, I’d say its biggest drawback is that it is tied to a web browser. This convenience comes at the price of sacrificing flexibility and simplicity. It is simple to save a text file. It is not trivial to save/overwrite a single file TW. You want to tap on a wiki file on Android and have it opened in a web browser? It’s not possible. Somehow you managed to serve it via HTTP locally and open it in the browser, now you want to save your changes? Good luck with that, see above. TW is “doomed” to carry the “browser curse”.
as they say
ymmv
and some times you find you have been
or like Saul-williams said -penny-for-a-thought
An emcee told a crowd of hundreds
To put their hands in the air
An armed robber stepped to a bank and told everyone
To put their hands in the air
A Christian minister gives his benediction while the congregation
Hold their hands in the air
Love the image of the happy Buddha
With his hands in the air
Hands up if you’re confused.
Define tomorrow
…
What have you bought into? How much will it cost to buy you out?
As mentioned earlier, Tw is limited by the browser and isn’t as native as other options. Other points:
The default view is reading mode; you need to click the edit button to switch to edit mode. It doesn’t look like a dedicated note-taking app, but rather an editable website.
Performance-wise, it isn’t designed to handle large datasets. MWS is addressing this issue.
Customization is both a strength and a weakness. The interface isn’t simple or intuitive enough.
That is a striking and insightful observation. It is absolutely true that back in 2004 I primarily saw TW as a way to make websites, and it was really other people who saw TWs potential for note taking. Both applications were based on the idea of a personal wiki, and so I tended to see them as two sides of the same coin.
TiddlyWiki can now be anything; it is a generic framework for building many different kinds of web application. Perhaps relegating note taking to be just another application has led to TW being slow to respond to practical and philosophical shifts in the field.
I think there would be great value in developing an edit mode that requires no context-shifting. It would have to be opt-in, given the number of different uses people have made of TW, but with that and with a few other features, we could well promote a specific TW edition as an infinitely more flexible alternative to Obsidian/Notion/org-mode/Joplin/whatever. But we still haven’t done much with promoting editions.1
Open source systems without steady funding often have this problem. It’s hard to find the energy to market the cool ideas you’ve brought to life… because there’s no one whose job is marketing, and you’re busy bringing the next one to life.
I wish I had time to take on this problem. I think it’s tractable. I think we could as a community create a number of useful editions that users can simply download and use: no configuration needed except choosing your color scheme. Those could be front-and-center on the home page, but with their own dedicated download/install workflows. This is eminently doable. But it takes effort. And me? I’m busy creating my next cool thing.
1And yes, that recipe edition is still on my own backlog!
What I do see at a wider level is the increasing encroachment of mega-scale servers claiming they are your personal friend.
Mega-Corp Browsers and O/S too (increasingly, practically, the same thingy) are making forcing strong inroads into ensuring encouraging you have to use their clouds for personal data they can use to data-ize you.
See, for instance, Braxman
Whilst I may be slightly (paranoid) exaggerating — I don’t think I’m so far off on the practical situation new browser users are coming into, and have been for a while. The “corporate culture” on personal usage has radically shifted, in a bad direction, I think.
On the positive side TiddlyWiki retains an un-compromised architectural purity and unrivalled scope on possible uses.
There are some examples of this many, under the banner of WYSIWYG editors and partial implementation like the section editor. There is nothing wrong with such implementations and I think we could develop these further, but - there is always a but. There are a lot of cases where this may not be desirable and touch screens or discreet knowledgebases where this division is desirable.
The new codemirror 6 2026 has a degree of WYSIYWIG but as you say is still a context shift.
Right. I think, there will always be some sort of “context shift”. If I load a wiki, select some text to copy/paste it. Accidentally type a character, when the text is selected and – boom text is gone. .. That would be more like confusing.
The main problem I see is file size. WYSIWYG libraries usually are bloated. With TW v5.4.0 we merged some code, that makes it possible to convert text from and now back to wikitext.
There is a demo WYSIWIG PR, which has a good chance to be a plugin for v5.5.0.
The plugin is about 920kByte in minified size. … It seems if you want to get something useful going as a WebApp you need that amount of code. The TW core is about 1.2MByte if minified. The new Codemirror plugins are about the same size.
Now the problem for me personally is, if I want to have all of them at the same time. … I need to add about 2+ MByte to an empty wiki, just to have the editors, with no content.
That’s not where I wan to be for a single file wiki.
It’s starts to be OK for a multi wiki server (MWS) configuration, where I can have different recipes with the same content. One read-only version, which only contains the content and an other recipe, which also contains the editors on demand. – That’s a completely different thing.
The main problem here is the increased complexity to maintain the backend. …
TiddlyWiki has many unique advantages. However, these advantages have resulted in a niche market.
To target the mass market, we need to define its positioning. One such positioning, as Jeremy mentioned, is as an operating system and development platform. This requires the promotional impact of more killer apps.
Another positioning is to use TiddlyWiki as a publishing platform. For example, publishing Obsidian notes to TiddlyWiki with a single click. For instance, one-click publishing of WordPress content to TiddlyWiki. Or one-click publishing of BASIC programs to TiddlyWiki. Taking it a step further, we could even enable importing TiddlyWiki content back into Obsidian.
We should consider forming interoperability alliances with any applications that use Markdown, SQLite, or TiddlyWiki’s JSON storage formats, as well as those with backend storage capabilities. These types of applications can be viewed as different processors for the same data format.
This is just an idea that occurred to me on a whim. I’m not sure how feasible it is.
I think this is an interesting approach @tomzheng and I may expand on what you said. I don’t know that we need to target a mass market, but I do think some promotion would expand our community and its capabilities. I do consider TiddlyWiki a Platform, and I think a lot of TiddlyWiki users/designers are in fact enamoured by its platform features. They know what they can build with it or dream of other possibilities.
This platform idea meshes with your suggestion of a “Publishing platform” but if we have one of those we would market to publishers not readers, Similarly we may target a data base administrator not the database users. This would help us target those in a position to understand what TiddlyWiki can do, the mass market will just be receivers of solution with TiddlyWiki as a hidden platform.
Code libraries and solutions that can be placed on the “TiddlyWiki platform” for demonstration, deployment, and building solutions.
We already have a few in some ways like LATEX, Diff Match Patch, to name two.
people who try and be cool often follow fashion’s and can be fickle, quickly moving to the next thing.
(sob-emoji)
