I’ve started using my wiki for everyday notes, but also to document standard operating procedures for my experiments using Linux as an operating system. I’ve come to a decision point and I would appreciate your views.
Do you use exclusively either Markdown (text/markdown) or TiddlyWiki 5 (text/vnd.tiddlywiki) in your tiddlers and what is the reason for your choice? Or do you use both? In that case, why and how?
I use TW’s wikitext for anything written natively in TW, and have no expectation to export from TW. This, to date, is the vast majority of the stuff I have.
Content that’s imported from another source - depends on the source. I’ve been importing various ad-hoc notes from other systems, where I’ve written them in something resembling markdown more than wikitext, so import them as markdown and cleanup from there. Otoh, some imports (from tomboy notes) I’ve written (still finishing) my own conversion tool, so I just wrote that to convert to each xml into a .tid directly.
Then there is content I expect to be exported in a raw form - notes and documentation I will send to others. This is in markdown, and doesn’t rely on any TW code.
In one TW, I have a longer term plan to use TW as a staging area for a static website, where the site will be written in markdown and converted using pandoc, jekyll, or other similar markdown->website tool, but my local storage will be within TW - acting as an instant preview. I’ve not delved into that side project much yet though, and I know TW itself can export individual tids to html too. Till I’ve had a chance to compare the various tools, I can’t say how that’ll go.
Also (more back on topic, kinda) it’s possible to embed markdown within wikitext, and pretty sure the reverse is possible too. But it’s not something I think is worth the effort most of the time. (the one place I sometimes switch formats internally is embedding a CSV to wikitext as a quick-and-dirty way of writing/importing a table - eg, like so:
$$$text/csv
height, tall
width, wide
length, deep
$$$
Final thought: does this sometimes mean I write formatting in wikitext/markdown when the other is needed? Absolutely (and 99% of that is sublists). But it’s easy to spot and fix so doesn’t bother me overall.
It does occurs to me writing this, that a css class set for the different content types would be neat, meaning I could (in edit mode) get an immediate visual hint to which type it is). But that’s a minor polish on the overall workflow.
Thank you. I appreciate your sharing your practice with me. I’m a beginner with TiddlyWiki even though I have used it in the past from the days of the Classic version, but rarely intensively over the years. So for now and maybe for a while I’ll have to decide on one type or the other until I can use TiddlyWiki with more ease and confidence.
It looks like I may end up using both types in the future, especially if the need would arise to use markdown notes “externally”.
On balance I’m leaning toward preferring the TiddlyWiki 5 native type for the present. My wikis are for my personal use and I don’t envisage sharing them. However, if the need arises, I hope that a way to convert some of my tiddlers to markdown may be found.
I use almost always tiddlywiki wikitext / tiddlywiki script as a rule however in a few special cases I also use markdown. The primary reason is when I copy and paste answers from ChatGPT as the result is given in markdown.
type=text/x-markdown in a wiki I use for this.I use both. I even use both in the same wiki sometimes. For “data” tiddlers, as in they don’t have any business logic, just static content/knowledge - I prefer Markdown most of the time. This is handy especially when I work with tiddlers outside TiddlyWiki - while there are language plugins for wikitext markup in Vim, Markdown syntax is much better (does anyone have syntax highlighting in Vim for complex long filter expressions?). This is for historical reasons as well, my pre-TiddlyWiki personal knowledge base was already in Markdown.
Wikitext is great as well, for tiddlers with dynamic content.
I guess that sooner or later I’ll have to learn how to use both types.
I have not tested robustly but if you spent 30mins working through the differences I dont think you would have any difficulty learing both;
I made a conversion table between TiddlyWiki wikitext and Markdown, with ChatGPT but it has a few errors. I will see if I can later, but I am less well versed in Markdown.
The fact that the toolbar functions differently according to the Type is a great help.
I use both. For most of my notes I use text/vnd.tiddlywiki, I guess because that’s what I started with. I use text/markdown when I need to do something more complicated.