Organizing ideas for future TW releases

[vilc]

Every now and then there are some topics or posts that come to interesting conclusions, which for backwards compatibility reasons cannot be incorporated in core TW5, but could be worth considering when a future TW6 or TWX would be created.

Some of these ideas are brought to life as plugins, but there are many that “go between the fingers”, because they are minor details or easy to change without developing plugins.

Do we have some way of organizing these ideas? If not, would it help us to create a tag or category on Discourse for them? Is there some other way to do this, without much administrative burden, on GitHub perhaps?
I imagine that @jeremyruston keeps a list of the most important things already.

Just some threads that would qualify I think:

• Contributing to tiddlywiki: What are the current requirements for backward compatibities? - Developers - Talk TW
• Should caption be displayed as main title? - Discussion - Talk TW (tiddlywiki.org)
• support for stroke-based icons, discussed in Adopt Feather/Lucide icons · Issue #7652 · Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5 (github.com)

Some ideas of the top of my head, surely already mentioned somewhere by someone:

• concept of palettes – Edit: here’s the link: Idea: approach to palettes and themes - Discussion - Talk TW (tiddlywiki.org)
• consistent naming of filter operators, core tiddlers (case), core icons
• view toolbar icons area separate from title area, so that by long title the icons aren’t awkwardly placed, mentioned by @DaveGifford I think, but I can’t find the thread

This is just to show that there are many such ideas floating around – not doable in TW5 core, but perhaps worth considering for a major release. Some of them bigger and seeing active development, some minor and easy to forget.

Or is this idea good in theory, but the actual topics and discussions are so broad and dispersed, that it is impossible to fully keep tabs on anyway?

[TW_Tones]

My view is we should argue for a solution or enhancement and leave the core compatibility question to later in the discussion, sure if you specifically want to rewrite something it may need to be listed for a later major version but most of the time we can find a solution that is also backward compatible.

There are so many ways to enhance or hack tiddlywiki already. I would argue that as it matures such drastic rewrites will become less common.

• Just start with asking the community
• A question such as * Should caption be displayed as main title? - Discussion - Talk TW (tiddlywiki.org) already has the answer yes, just hack it.
• Even substantial refactoring or UI alternatives can be implemented on top of tiddlywiki already and you can release your own custom Edition?

[wattahay]

I have a large set of macro ideas floating around. (“macro” as in wide-breadth)

What harm could it do to accumulate all kinds of ideas?

But like, could the community withstand such a breakage, and mass of development really?

[TW_Tones]

No harm accumulating ideas, even ones that break current rules, but there is no reason to just collect ideas that break rules.

Collect all the ideas we can and implement them if possible. A small number break the rules and cant yet be implemented, we keep them for later.

To me the emphasis is good ideas and implement them, otherwise keep them for later.