I had a go at this and really like it! Importantly, it supports standard Ctrl+F searches which TiddlyDesktop does not. It is also noticeably higher-performance than TiddlyDesktop on Windows 10. I’m quite excited about this and can easily see it replacing TiddlyDesktop with a little more work.
There are a few observations I have to share:
Improvements I’d like
In rank order:
- I would prefer to open external links with my system’s web browser instead of the WebView.
- A Linux edition. I’m not sure how Tauri works, but it would be great if there was a version of LiddlyDesktop configured for Wayland only (not an X/Wayland mix), unlike TiddlyDesktop in its standard distribution.
- A warning prompt before closing LiddlyDesktop if there are unsaved changes.
- Be able to set a wiki to be opened by default - and I appreciate TiddlyDesktop doesn’t support this either. This could probably be addressed as part of your idea of how to return to the main screen.
- It seems the size of the window is hardcoded. The operating system normally remembers the window size (and I prefer TW maximised), but LiddlyDesktop always goes back to a smaller size when I launch it. I would prefer that that LiddlyDesktop respects the standard OS behaviour in this regard.
- This might be a bit ‘above and beyond’, but given that search works in a more conventional way, I can see this replacing Tiddloid on Android for me. But I appreciate an Android port would probably be much harder.
Bugs
- I successfully opened and saved an existing wiki with LiddlyDesktop. On my second launch though, I had to give filesystem permissions again twice (on the main screen and inside my wiki). The save failed initially and I got an error. However, hitting ‘save changes’ again it did work.
- Opening a tiddler in a new window works, but when I tried to close the window, LiddlyDesktop became unresponsive for a while the first time around. It didn’t freeze again, for what that’s worth.
- LiddlyDesktop shows “about:blank” in the address bar when a tiddler has been opened in a new window.
Other notes
- ‘Sideload’ seems like an odd term to use for loading an existing wiki - I’m not sure what you are getting at with that?
- There are permissions prompts for the filesystem API which surprised me a little; I thought it would ‘just work’ without needing the prompts. I wonder if this is configurable so to require less prompts.
- It would be nice to know where the data for LiddlyDesktop (right now, just the list of recent files/URLs) is stored. Perhaps it could be stored in the same folder, which would let you take it on a USB drive as well.