I have got very interested in issues to do with “how many Tiddlers can you have open?” …
My thought is to open wikis so that ALL Normal Tiddlers are displayed on load and use a live filter mechanism to hide those not of interest (along the lines of how @BurningTreeC does it in MCL “live column reductive search”) via user input search/filter (they still there, but hidden).
I am not asking here about numbers of Tiddlers in a wiki.
Rather seeking your thoughts on the number of open Tiddlers (that would be sensibly possible).
For instance is 800 open Tiddlers viable? (just an arbitrary number)
I have not tried opening hundreds of tiddlers at once but I have some experience with how TW works under the hood. I see two possible issues with this approach:
While modern browsers are very fancy, all of that DOM (HTML structure) information has to be stored somewhere and sifted through when things happen. With most elements being invisible I don’t think it’d be that much of a big deal, but keep in mind that having a few hundred fairly complex entities on the page, even if invisible, could potentially cause slowdown when DOM is mutated (that is anything changes on the page).
Tiddlywiki rendering works by creating objects that match what you see on the screen and having them listen to changes. This can end up being dozens of nested objects in a simple tiddler (just the UI) and hundreds (or even thousands, see below) in one with a fair bit of content. Every time you make a change to a tiddler, TW will ask each of those objects if they need to be updated. With hundreds of open tiddlers this can result in tens of thousands of events to check. You can probably expect delays of at least ~100ms per tiddler change, much more depending on your circumstances. (technically
And your circumstances might include having a gigantic table with few hundreds of rows and nested lists, which you use to track which LEGO bricks you’re still missing in the old LEGO sets you’re trying to complete. Thankfully TW seems to be very clever about when it has to rerender a whole thing like that, but if you happen to have a lot of tiddlers with a lot of broad lists doing even simple things, the stacking will be unforgiving.
So I decided to test it. I opened 430 tiddlers on https://tiddlywiki.com, I did so running this script in the developer console after unfolding a bunch of menus on the right:
for (const i of document.querySelectorAll('.tc-tiddlylink')) {
i.click()
}
And some rough timings:
Clicking Edit on a page - ~1.5s
Waiting for draft to update after making any changes - ~0.5s
Saving changes to a page - ~1.0s
General interaction - a noticeable slowdown, probably something in the lines of 0.1ms
Is it usable? Yes Would I use it? No, unless I was paid to do so
It only renders some of the tiddlers as shown in the sidebar. You can run your tests there. I think there is no real slowdown. … BUT if you scroll very fast, you may see the refresh. … Depending on how fast your computer is.
I did test it with my mobile. There you can see the refresh from time to time, if you scroll very fast and the browser uses the momentum. I was able to scroll 140 tiddlers in the river with 1 swipe and saw about 10 “fly by” updates
I did think about this too and did create a prototype of a story editor plugin, which is alpha quality, because the workflow is way to complicated to be useful.
It adds a “save story” button at the end of the “Resent tab”, which makes it easy to create a new story. Eg: my-stroy
If the “Recent” tab is used it will create a config tiddler and store the order in the my-story – list field
The cool thing now is, that you can create a new configuration that uses a filter-field.
Eg: reverse-story with a filter: [enlist{my-story!!list}reverse[]]
Including the possibility to drag and drop sort lists that contain filter-strings, which isn’t possible with TW atm.
I think a system like this would be more efficient that opening 800 tiddlers and then apply a search.
I don’t know what BTC does but a very cool thing with all tiddlers open and filtering out tiddlers by purely using CSS is that you can have a static TW where you seemingly open and close tiddlers!
Tx, TT