Question about manually installing plugins

[vuk]

Quote from https://tiddlywiki.com/#Manually%20installing%20a%20plugin :

3. In another browser window, find a link to the plugin, e.g. https://tiddlywiki.com/plugins/tiddlywiki/katex. You will typically find these links on the home page of the plugin

4. Drag the link similar to $:/plugins/tiddlywiki/example to the browser window containing your TiddlyWiki

Many third party plugins, notably “kookma” ones, also encourage this workflow, by explicitly suggesting the drag-and-drop approach.

Are there alternative plugin installing workflows (for single HTML wiki) NOT involving drag-and-drop at all?

There are at least two scenarios when I feel like the suggested drag-and-drop approach is stepping on my foot:

1. Single HTML wiki opened in a tab of a full screen (or just maximized) web browser window on single display desktop (or laptop).
2. Single HTML wiki opened in a web browser tab on Android (so, the browser window is maximized again) or in Tiddloid app. There’s no mouse even on a smartphone, I have no idea how to achieve drag-and-drop there.

For plugins hosted on a website, I’d rather copy the URL and have a way to explicitly paste it somewhere in the TiddlyWiki instead of drag-and-drop, and have the wiki finish the plugin download/install, but I can’t figure out if this is posdible at all and how to do it.

As for plugins from another single HTML TiddlyWiki local file, again, I have no idea how to import them without involving drag-and-drop between two windows that are side by side in either of the two scenarios described above.

[EricShulman]

@vuk

As for plugins from another single HTML TiddlyWiki local file, again, I have no idea how to import them without involving drag-and-drop between two windows that are side by side in either of the two scenarios described above.

For importing from local files, you can use the “import” button, which can be found in the Sidebar > Tools tab. When you click this button, a platform-specific “open a file/folder” dialog will appear.

In addition, for faster access to the import button, you can click the checkbox next to it, and it will be added (as a paperclip icon) to the Sidebar “Page Toolbar” (above the search input).

-e

[tw-FRed]

Also, with any plugin link, you can just click on it, and then use viewmode toolbar buttons to export the complete plugin as a json file, which can be imported in any other tiddlywiki, even offline (see Eric’s answer for details on import process).

Fred

[Scott_Sauyet]

I’m wondering if there’s also some way to do this from the developer tools. There are so many options under $tw, that I haven’t been able to look though it all, But is something like this possible from the source wiki?:

$tw.something.another.sendMessage(
  'tm-copy-to-clipboard', 
  $tw.wiki.whatever('$:/my/plugin')
)

so that we could just paste onto the new wiki the way we can do with, say, copied image data?

[baiguai]

I always do what was suggested above.
Go to the plugins section, export it to my local machine (Where I can store a back up of it), then use the import button.

[pmario]

Some plugins have a plugin-library, that can use the same mechanism you use for TW core plugins.

Open the $:/ControlPanel → Plugins tab and click the “Get more plugins” button.
If you have the 3rd party plugin configuration it will show up in the dialogue.

The video how to get the configuration can be seen at: https://wikilabs.github.io/

Or you can import the config attached here.

$__config_wikilabs_PluginLibraryWL_latest.json (352 Bytes)

As far as I know @Mohammad also has a plugin-library like that, but it seems to be “indisposed” at the moment.

[arunnbabu81]

Here is a list of most of the plug in libraries available in tiddlywiki

Tiddlywiki Community Plugin Libraries

This is a wiki post, please add available plugin libraries here. Please contribute HowTo download a library drag and drop into your wiki 3.open $:/ControlPanel → Plugins → Get More Plugins select the library and open plugin library add or update your desired plugins Available Community Plugin Libraries CPL (Chinese community plugin library) $__plugins_Gk0Wk_CPL-Repo.json (7.2 KB) SQPL (Saq Imtiaz plugin library) $__config_SQPL.json (533 Bytes) WLPL (WikiLabs plugin library - Mario Pietsch…

[vuk]

Posts 1 and 2 complete each other and solve my problem just fine. At the same time I am aware of the fact that I would not be able to figure it on my own for a very long time, even by reading over the plugins section of the docs for the end user. What about slightly completing that part by adding not only this alternative way of installing plugins, but also slightly diving into the “why” aspect? I am thinking of something like this (but please correct me if I’m getting something wrong here):

In TiddlyWiki, everything is a tiddler (just a la “in UNIX, everything is a file”). Tiddlers can be [[exported|How to export tiddlers]] and [[imported|Importing Tiddlers]]. From this perspective, installing a plugin is just a particular case of importing a tiddler. What happens behind the curtain when a plugin is installed using the above suggested drag-and-drop approach, can be done in a more verbose manner, when drag-and-drop is technically harder or not an option at all. When clicking on a plugin link like “’$:/my/plugin”, its tiddler is opened. One can export it as JSON file, then just import that file (see above). If the plugin is contained in another single file TiddlyWiki stored locally, it is possible to skip the export as JSON step and import from that file directly.