Suggestion: Allow excise tool to accommodate Philosophy of Tiddlers

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#1

Currently the excise tool cuts the selected text and pastes it into a new tiddler. You have the option of tagging it with the source tiddler, if you’re following the taggly-tag metaphor.

But frequently the reason to excise is to break a long tiddler into shorter bits, either for tiddler management reasons, or to comply with the philosophy of tiddlers. Unfortunately, the excised text loses all the other meta data – fields and tags – that help maintain it’s relation to the source tiddler. Often this information is identical, or nearly identical, to that of the source tiddler. Recreating this meta data is a bit tedious and error-prone. Or more to the point, it’s easy to forget to do.

I would like to suggest that an enhancement for the tool would be a checkbox that allows the excised tiddler to reflect the original source meta data.

Thanks for reading!

4 Likes
#2

Excellent idea, thank you @Mark_S – would you mind making a GitHub ticket?

#3

Submitted.

[IDEA] Allow excise tool to accommodate Philosophy of Tiddlers #7077

#4

@Mark_S Mark I have being down similar routes before when excising, cloning or using new here. I would like to suggest not a checkbox but a selection.

It is of course critical that you can choose what is to be included in the new tiddler even its if “all or none” because different solutions demand one behaviour over the other. This is what your checkbox does.

  • I like your suggestion for an option to “reflect the original source meta data” but I am confident I would NOT be able to use it often because it will often include things which will still force me to edit the resulting tiddler eg remove something like the todo tag

One approach I have found may be a better approach.

  • In addition to “copy everything on excise”.

  • We define one or more fields or tags as “context elements” when you excise, clone etc… you can do so “in context” which means the context values are passed from the current to the new tiddlers but not other fields and tags. The same mechanism can be used in new here and clone buttons.

Example fields we may add to context;

  • project name
  • domain (work personal etc…)
  • parent (containing current tiddler)
  • parent as tag on new tiddler (like current excise option and new here)

Example fields we may not add to context and thus the new tiddlers

  • Description
  • Caption
  • Core fields modified created etc
  • tags such as task/reference etc…

A very powerful solution would be if we can have a selection (with a default) that allows (your original) “copy everything” or choose from a list of configured “context items” to be copied to the new tiddler.

  • Perhaps even choose from content in source tiddler.

I think tiddlywiki would benefit as a whole if we provided a mechanism to specify the values that are “tiddlers contexts”, perhaps even globally. At the moment we can only tag (new Here) or Clone.

If it helps I am confident I can code the the solution to your current request, the checkbox on excise “clone” values.

  • However my suggestion here suggests a seperate/alternate excise button designed to honour the “tiddlers context” would be better.
  • What do you think?