Hi Folks,
I have being somwhat absent of late, but while reviewing the 5.3.6 release I noticed a paucity of information about many of the details for each change. So I was researching about how to make my own notes and or provide more information in future releases.
- Perhaps even something to publish in the newsletter?
One example is;
added support for a control panel setting to configure the maximum number of tiddlers shown in the “recent” tab
Whilst we could provide a link to $:/core/ui/ControlPanel/Settings/RecentLimit
this opens the setting tiddler itself, and does not show that, to see this, you need Control Panel > Settings > TiddlyWiki tab, then find it listed under “Recent Tab Limit”.
I have found a somewhat manual way to collect the information needed, specific tab state tiddlers and their values, and the root tiddler $:/ControlPanel, and its fairly strate forward to make a macro to provision a link that also navigates to and sets the required state.
Lets discuss
- How and what kind of information can we provide about each chage in each release.
- Simplifying the process of refering to Menu items in tabs sets, especialy nested tabsets.
Simplifying the process of refering to Munu items in tabs sets, especialy nested tabsets
Since all tabsets and nested tabsets are rendered through the tabs macro it sould be simple enought to enhance that to support some improved features here. I was thinking something like this;
- Each tab state tiddler also stores the currentTiddler in the story when it was set
- in the above example this would be $:/ControlPanel
- Thus when such state tiddlers are set the infomation about the root tiddler from which this state was changed would be available. If implemented for tabs and other comon state tiddlers this would help hacking or debuging by being able to identify from within which tiddler was it changed.
- This is fairly frugal because because these are state tiddlers that get reused.
- The issue gets more complicated once we have a heirachy of tabs because we want to set the other state tiddlers relating to this position in the menus.
- Although it is somewhat easy to navigate the tabs heirachy then look at the last state tiddlers to change I wonder if there is a programatic way to identify the multiple state tiddlers involved in a submenu item?
- Technicaly this may be possible because the widget tree holds this, however there may be simpler ways to achive this. Hence this discussion.
My approach
Rather than build a single solution here, I am thinking about enhancing tiddlywiki by adding a little hackability so this needs minimal code but also introduces other avenues for user and designer hacks.
- What if all uses of state tiddlers (in core macros at least) did more to identify where in the UI the state tiddler was changed?
- What if when nesting tabs the root and intermediate code tiddlers (see thisTiddler) was available so we had sufficent information it becomes deterministic.
- Without deterministic information a somewhat complex reverse engeneering is needed to get this information.