Tiddlywiki "ruined" my experience with file explorer

Café
#1

I state that I speak of windows and that I have never been expert with the use of the file explorer. I have always organized all my files, from family photos to bureaucratic documents following a purely hierarchical system.

And I was proud of it for a long time. It’s a system that worked pretty well for me, I’ve built it well.
But then I discovered TiddlyWiki. And I’m using tiddlywikifor a little over a year now to collect my ideas, considerations and so on. And browsing among these is a breeze. Browsing instead between my files, my photos etc. not as much.

Boy doest that system I was proud of look like something really primitive now. :joy:

I’m not even talking about the more advanced features and the endless customization possibilities, but just looking at the basic things you can use in tiddlywiki to manage tiddlers.
For example tags: I know you can use them even in the default file explorer. But to say it’s uncomfortable is an understatement.
In tiddlywiki, having the ability to customize almost everything, I can also make some specific searches faster, even if I have many tiddlers (or in any case I can save them, perhaps in the form of a list of links). Maybe there are ways to do similar things with file explorer as well, but searching I didn’t find anything really useful.

I know very well that the tiddler philosophy is something really special and cannot be transferred to other applications. I’m not trying to do such a thing.
But at least some little things should be easier.

Have any of you been in a similar situation?
Or anyway, how do you manage your files and folders?

I’m first of all curious, but I admit that I’m also looking for inspiration :eyes:

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#2

I have the same problem with most other applications now, if I can’t sort and organize however I want and change the UI it feels very restrictive and difficut to work with.
I have started experienting with links to files in tiddlywiki as a pseudo-file explorer, but while it seems like it could be useful with a lot of polishing, it has been of limited use becaues of the up-front setup.

#3

this has potential… i wonder if a script could be written in python etc. to scan your file system and make tiddlers for everything (files, folders, etc)? keeping it quick and live-updating when you make changes would be an optimization nightmare though i imagine.

#4

I think the default file search on Windows is very very slow and inconvenient. :pensive:
So I use everything to search on Windows.
You just need a good name for each file, so that you can easy to search in everything. :grinning:

[Youtube] Find Your Files INSTANTLY on Windows

#5

Yea… windows file explorer isn’t exactly the best.

But if it’s the structure that feels ruined for you, something to consider is that a lot of the time, network structures give way to hieretical structures, and vice versa, they often coexist and connect to one another quite well.

So if you’re used to it, but also enjoy the freedom of network structures, maybe try combining them in ways that works for you?

personally thats what I do, I use my tags as a network structure, and from the tag, a hieretical structure of the tiddlers related to that tag.

basically (tag for dogs) > “types of dogs section (hierarchy)” > (dog type1) (dog type 2) et cetera

1 Like
#6

Bob already has a feature that does pretty much that, but it is set up to find media files to be used in wikis. The live-updating is a problem because there are a limited number of file watchers that you can have at any time but I am sure there is some magic you can use to get around it.
And yeah, optimization would be difficult to say the least.
And on the wiki side if you use tags to organize the files you will run into problems once you get more than about 100k files (I think, I don’t remember the numbers people were reporting for when it became a problem).

On a related side note, I need to remember to look at if anyone has tried using Sets and set inclusion instead of indexof for managing tags in the core. I have a dream of making a very simple b±tree implementation to handle wikis with a very large number of tagged tiddlers, but I doubt that I will have time for that.

#7

Exactly

Sounds intriguing, could you please explain better what you mean?

#8

Ah hah, my true weakness, but I’ll give it a shot!

So lets say I have a journal tiddler, and in it I have [[buddy]], who is tagged with (Dogs). in my tiddlywiki, I usually move the tags tab from the moresidebar to the sidebar, and use it to navigate to tiddlers.

so anyway, I click on the (dogs) tag, and a list of all tiddlers tagged with dogs will show up. I click on buddy, and the tiddler about him will pop up, OR I click on Dogs, and the tiddler titled dogs, which is also the tag, shows up.

In that Dogs tiddler, I’ll have the TOC snippet pasted inside, so all dogs will be in there, and the tiddlers related to those dogs will be under the specific dog.

I dunno if that’s any better explained, but I hope that helps haha

#9

Oh no, sorry maybe I explained myself badly.
I have no problem organizing TiddlyWiki, my problem is organizing my files.
My problem is that TiddlyWiki is so good that seeing how other things are organized (like files in folders on a computer) makes them look primitive. :sweat_smile:

Thank you all the same for the explanation (which for the record was a good one)

#10

No worries haha

As far as file organization in general, hrm.
Yea- TiddlyWiki is sort of unparred in the way it sorts things.
You can always make folders for topics in your documents folder on windows, and create folder shortcuts to things that are related to it, and keep them in that topics folder?

It’s all preference at the end of the day, heck my boss just throws every document on her desktop and uses the file explorer to sort by date created to find what she needs, so… pick your poison haha

It’s a tough none the less, one that people have been dealing with for awhile. I personally like to go with date/time/topic/subtopic, and include shortcuts to other folders / websites within them.

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#11

This is somewhat related, but for a long time I have used Notational Velocity and currently have about 1200 notes stored in Dropbox. This is great, but I am trying to put more information into TiddlyWiki. Using separate text files is great for some purposes, but I like the ability to have all of my notes in a single file for the same ease of searching and organizing. Then I can download my TiddlyWiki and know I have a complete copy of all of my data in one single file.

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#12

Tiddlywiki’s tagging system does indeed greatly enhance the searching and organizing of information. I would love to use Tiddlywiki to catalog my files also i.e. integrate Tiddlywiki with the files system so I can tag the files, add comments and notes and be able to easily retrieve files and notes later. Not all the files, only those that I care about. Add a description to a photo or a bunch of photos, or some documents i created, or some files I have just downloaded. There’s only so much info I can put into a filename.

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#13

I do not use Tiddlywiki to store files or pictures. I use it to keep and find notes on a variety of tools I use for development, configurations of various systems like how to connect to each database, snippets of code for various languages, etc. And the search function is very handy.

The search function for Windows is very very slow so for Windows searching for filenames I use a free program called Everything. Everything is from Voidtools. Everything - voidtools

#14

I used Notational Velocity for years as well. My first transition to using TW5 instead involved using the node.js version to bring the external text files into TW as editable tiddlers, while keeping them in their original location on disk as text files. Since then I’ve implemented a NV clone in TW to have the best of both worlds, and have almost convinced myself that the individual text files are no longer necessary (pending a better mobile UX for TW that I am currently working on).

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#15

There is a type of Windows you can customize and use system alternatives written by other people, I moved to it around six years ago and I haven’t missed Windows since - it’s called Linux - Ubuntu :rofl:

#16

Any remote possibility of publishing it as an experimental plug in ? Just a query.