Tiddlywiki as a note taking tool - Positive and negative aspects - Lets discuss

#21

Although I haven’t studied the linked material in depth I can attribute my own experiences. For context I searched for several decades for a journaling system. I tried things like OmniFocus, TaskWarrior, Things, and even Markdown files. Nothing stuck. Nothing I did kept me active on the system daily. It wasn’t till I started using TW as my daily note-taking and to do tracking system at my current job did it stick. For me TW is a fantastic tool that I have depended on every day for four years consistently.

The points the OP is making seem pedantic to me. Though technically correct in their observations I feel they don’t apply to my own experiences and needs of a daily notes system. Perhaps these concerns would be more noticeable to me if I were to use TW in a different kind of note taking (college classes, book research)—but in this case I think I would not associate TW as the tool for the job as my outcome might likely be more a text book then a wiki—I mean there is MediaWiki for that kind of scale and seriously who is taking notes at the scale of Wikipedia?!

I also take issue at the idea that notes I take on a daily basis would have need to back-link and full text search so far back as to need 30K tiddlers! I figure in about five years of making tiddlers daily I will move the > 5 years ones to an archive. Easy under Node as they are all text files on disk. Speaking of which if I need to full text search that I’d either use grep or feed the text files into Elastic Search.

I feel like they were expecting TW to solve more problems then it is designed to do. TW works well for me and I am ever thankful it is available to me.

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#22

I use TiddlyWiki for note-taking. I started a few years back (before the current Obsidian/Logseq goldrush) for a work project. Use then expanded to all of work and then to everything. In essence, I started a commonplace book by accident.

This means that the first objection, the on again / off again use, doesn’t resonate with me. I’ve been using one wiki for in excess of 8 years with my usage growing rather than becoming sporadic.

I also don’t tend to spend a lot of time tinkering. Here and there I’ll look for a plugin or fiddle with the aesthetics, but mostly I use it to write hypertext.

I have started moving my usage over to Markdown with time. While it is true that the default is wikitext, it isn’t hard to get most defaults moved over to markdown. I’ve wondered if having a good Markdown Edition (as opposed to a demo) would help.

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#23

i appreciate the ability to tinker and manipulate my notes as it is fun, helps to streamline my future workflow, gives me something to do when things are slow, and most importantly gives me more opportunities to look at and learn about my and how everything connects in different ways - which helps inspire new ideas!

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#24

7 posts were split to a new topic: The TW Filter Syntax Documentation – There is Room for Improvements

#28

I’ve been using TiddlyWiki since 2017 and my understanding it was quite basic to begin with but I was able to get a lot of use out of it. Grok helped my understanding a lot though I’ve only partially gone through the course. There gets a point where I struggled with it and my brain kept glazing over. (I blame tiredness and my own lack of programming understanding more than anything else on this front.) I’ve tried going back to it again and plan to again in the future. I’ve already got a lot out of it though and more from checking this forum daily for problems/ solutions that may be of use and for ideas of what else I can do with my various wiki instances.

I don’t use TiddlyWiki as a note taking tool though I did attempt to use it this way when I first found it. I have other tools at hand that work well for note taking that are quick, easily accessible and not so easily lost if I accidently refresh my screen. I do use it as a note keeping tool though which I thinki is an important distinction. Notes taken by other methods are not so easily found after and spread out through various different locations. If previously written notes have been found important or useful enough to keep for future reference I would take the time to draft some tiddler articles based on them. I’ve also adapted some documentation into the wiki to make the information more accessible.

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#31

To get things back on topic, i can offer a few pros and cons

+ notes can be formatted in various ways and formats using css that other notes apps dont offer

+ templates let you design your tidders to look however you need them, be it kanban, dossier, checklist, table, or cornell

+ design custom snippets, macros, and keybinds to make your workflow quicker and better fit to you

+ community made solutions tend to be well designed

- the steep learning curve makes it challenging to make those things for your usecase

- some of the naming of operators, fields and classses limit the users choice in some cases.

- the large amount of things tw can do also means Learning how to do those things, which can be challenging enough to take more time to figure out than to use for notetaking

I use my tw as notepads more than notebooks nowadays. I often export my tiddlers into jaon to sort in my ssd or import specific ones to use as reference.

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#33

on “5. issues with search” i really like @clsturgeon 's rsort e.g. Auto complete with sorting by relevance and am using it with command palette after reading @etardiff 's Navigating to a missing tiddler with the Command Palette? - #7 by etardiff

i can’t access https://philosopher.life/ to read the “audit note by the author” (raised in “1. inability to scale”, which implies Riz’s note is from a while back) but i suffered data loss until i realised that browsers by default will cache (single-file) TW, and started to only use non-cached “private” windows/browser settings to always load the latest version instead of a cached version that might not contain my latest changes. if you haven’t fallen foul of this particular scenario, you will likely never realise it happened, and it’s super difficult to diagnose/appreciate without a particular set of circumstances.

but any saving system for any notetaking system has gotchas (e.g. cloud saving), this is just one that happened to affect my usage of tiddlywiki and happily is now solved. i’m not sure if this is the issue that affected the “audit note by the author” as that note is not accessible to me, but it could be a candidate.

i agree with @Mark_S and others, i also very highly appreciate TW’s semi-“independence” of being able to run a “simple” long-term reliable tool by decent authors, which is a point not mentioned in Riz’s note. a commercial product brings a commercial bias, which carries substantial negative risk that we likely can’t evaluate.

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#34

There’s a discussion about this author, site, and disappearance, along with a link to an archive of the site, here:

I have this problem daily on my android device. I always have to reload once or twice to get the latest version of a synched TW file. I’ll have to see if private mode will fix it.

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#35

It may be possible to not cache tw using meta data -

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