For a long time during its early years, TiddlyWiki 5 had the tag line “a reboot of TiddlyWiki for the next 25 years”. I wanted to communicate my commitment to keeping TiddlyWiki going as long as I could, and my desire to architect it in such a way as to make that possible. (At that point, 25 years in the other direction was 1986; not much software from that era was still in common usage apart from Unix, which naturally ended up being an inspiration).
We’re now 11 years until we get to that 25 year mark. What with the passage of time and other developments, I think this is a good time to start talking about where we want TiddlyWiki to be by that point, and to consider the longer term future of TiddlyWiki.
I think there’s a few areas that we might need to look at:
- I love working on TiddlyWiki with this community so much that I have perhaps ended up working on too many fronts: the core, TiddlyDesktop, the planned TiddlyWiki app for iOS, MWS, and many more minor experiments. I have a relatively large number of open pull requests for core improvements that are under development. I think that to make more progress I need to focus on the core. That means organising ourselves a little more formally so that others can start to form teams and partnerships to take on all the other things that need doing. I am delighted that this has already happened with MWS: @Arlen22 has stepped up to take the lead, and is surging ahead with an improved implementation, working with others in the community to do so
- Planning a new release of TiddlyWiki in the near future that judiciously and surgically makes some modest breaks in backwards compatibility in order to allow us to bring in some of the improvements that are currently held back by concerns about backwards compatibility. For example, allowing comments within filters and between widget attributes would clearly be very useful, but can only be implemented at the cost of a rather technical and narrow break in backwards compatibility. I’ll write a separate post with some further ideas for what I’m tentatively calling v5.4.0
- We could do a better job of capturing the underlying motivations, philosophy and vision of TiddlyWiki (or mission, vision and values, if you prefer). My work is driven by beliefs such as “the highest calling of developers is to pass our magical powers onto others”, or “the only way to meet the diverse needs of everybody is to allow deep customisation of the user experience”. Another one is “the most important characteristic of software is the business model; we need business models that are aligned with user needs”. Insofar as ideas like that are drivers for TiddlyWiki I’d like to get them down. However, I believe the perspective of end users matters more than mine: I would like to capture what people value about TiddlyWiki and what makes them care. Making the case for TiddlyWiki is about storytelling, and there are gaps at the moment that make it quite hard to follow
- I think we also need to start thinking about what comes next: a completely new version of TiddlyWiki that uncompromisingly eschews backwards compatibility in order to be the essence of everything that we’ve learned: the smallest, simplest possible implementation of TiddlyWiki. We’ve called this TWX in the past. For me, a big motivation comes from the desire to remove the cruft and irregularities that obscure the central simplicity of TiddlyWiki. Back in 2011 I still didn’t know what I was doing, and it’s taken all this time since then to fully understand what TiddlyWiki is, and what it could be. I want us to take everything that we’ve learned and apply it to make the best thing we can come up with – and get a prototype standing up before we get to 2036
I am sure there are more things along similar lines that it would be helpful to think about, and would welcome suggestions.