My tiddlydesktop experience

#1

Oh… I just realized I have erased all the beginning of my post before submitting it!

I give a try to tiddlydesktop 0.0.18 under debian linux. Overall it’s good stuff!

But I have a mixed feeling nonetheless because of three problems I don’t know how to solve:

  • how can I have access to the window menu? I can’t see it. Keyboard shortcuts do not work. This mean I can’t do a lot of things and especially I cant do any find/replace editing!
  • I can’t open external link. these would have to open firefox (my default browser). but I alway get an alert box with an error message after a few seconds: “Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To use Firefox, you must first close the existing Firefox process, restart your device, or use a different profile” if I left-click on them. But a right-click open a new firefox window with the wanted URL. This is gennerally the thing I want but In a regaular browser window this is the thing I get with a left-click! But anyway, the new window is a chromium window and it doesn’t have any window menu (just like the tiddlywiki window) and I can’t see or get the URL it is pointing to (for instance to open is in firefox).
  • I can’t see or copy the URL of any external link.

A good point is that F12 is giving me access to developper toolkit but in a separate window! This is really a very nice thing (instead of doing it with a few clicks everytime I want it).

Is there a cure for these problems?

On the whole, this is a very interesting product, pretty convenient but for the irritating points I mentioned. It allows me to easily maintain several wikis with regular backups. I can also open those wikis in a regular browser window if need be.

#2

It’s not a browser, it’s a standalone “OS window”. All your issues are likely to stem from there. From a dev perspective, once you go down the TDesktop road, you leave a lot behind.

#3

Thank you @CodaCoder for the precision. It’s always helpful to know what’s going on.

I agree with you that tiddlydesktop is not very dev friendly, but I don’t use it for my dev work, but for regular user works. But a regular user surely want to be able to do some search-replace or get access to URLs.

So, do you mean that I can’t get access to all of that with tiddlydesktop?

#4

What’s referred to as the “browser chrome” (the bells and whistles surrounding the web page) are not available in the TDesktop window. It’s simply NOT a browser, therefore it cannot browse, therefore there is no “need” to give access to an address bar. As a consequence, lots of other things get thrown away – things like Ctrl-F simply won’t work.

It’s a one-way street, with no exits :confused:

I think also, anything cookie-based will have problems. Last time I used TDesktop (eons ago), that was a showstopper for me. Every TDesktop wiki shared the same cookies. :scream: Maybe that’s better today? I’m not sure.

.tw as a wiki file extension and browser specific wikis
#5

More info here: https://nwjs.io/

#6

I am on Ubuntu Linux 20.04. I use older version Tiddly Desktop Version0.0.15-prerelease.6 (slow in my updates when current version working well) and it works fine on it. I do not do development but just use for GTD tiddlywikis.

Yes no Search/Replace in Tiddly Desktop for reasons specified in other replies. I think here is a TW5 plugin for search/replace.

Re opening links Firefox already running message, when I get that and do not see that firefox profile open, I kill firefox processes in System Monitor as likely not shut-down properly last use. Then works ok.

1 Like
#7

TiddlyDesktop has only a subset of what a normal browser has, it has the key advantage of having permissions on the local host that a browser does not, but misses out on all the useful addons and extensions available in browsers.

I need to replicate your problem following external links because I don’t recall a problem with this. Although I only have Windows 11 available at this time.

  • It was fine to open external links in your default browser as far as I remember. Tested fine on windows 11. Opens in my default browser including firefox when set.
  • Links to file / folder open my windows explorer
  • Links to a local document open in the required app

When I tried to open the local document I got this message in windows

Snag_37be24
Snag_37be24787×387 74.9 KB

  • Perhaps the equivalent is occurring on your OS but you are not getting to interact with it?

There are options in many cases to obtain alternatives to browser “addons and extensions” by installing features into the TiddlyWiki, plugins and TiddlyWiki script solutions.

For example;

  • I am a fan of bookmarklets, by saving them in a tiddler I can transfer them to a TiddlyDesktop wiki and click the bookmarklet link inside the wiki to have the “javascript” applied.

This is the same for me because TiddlyDesktop does not show a hovered link below or provide a right-click copy.

  • Of note is these TiddlyDesktop links can be dropped on a browser address bar where you can see and open them or drop on a tiddlywiki to import the link into an untitled tiddler.
  • Of course you could build a macro to provide the url to then generate a link, a tooltip on hover and say a crtl-click to copy to clipboard.
    • With 5.3.x we can now intercept the use of the link widget so it may be possible to treat any links on tiddlydesktop differently providing the features you are after.
#8

Post script: I can see how in TiddlyDesktop if I use r-click inspect on a link we get to see the URL there in. Not the most elegant but it is a workaround always “at hand”.