@Shane_Ashby asked an interesting question. And while I don’t think what he wants is possible, it does suggest to me an intriguing possibility for a useful bit of tooling. Could we make a wiki into a virtual file system that could be mounted in an OS? Lots of tools do this. Dropbox acts like a file system I could simply drop files into, rearrange, etc. (Or at least it used to; I haven’t used it in years.) Windows sometimes uses zip files like this. Linux seems to be able to mount anything. Could Tiddlywiki do the same thing, either with an individual wiki or a collection of them?
It might be an entirely flat system, the way Tiddlywiki has a single tiddler namespace. But we could make it virtually hierarchical, with the /
treated as a folder separator. (There’s one minor catch here. Most hierarchical file systems allow a name to represent either a folder or a file, but Tiddlywiki’s namespace would probably insist it could be both: foo/bar
is a tiddler name, and so is foo/bar/baz
. But I think we could deal with that.)
This would of course solve @Shane_Ashby’s issue, but seems to have larger implications for another powerful way to use TW.
I don’t know how to do this; I’ve never written a virtual file system; I’m sure doing so is at least moderately complex, but are the fundamental flaws in the idea? And if we could do it, are there good reasons we shouldn’t? Would people use this? We already have a workable drag-and-drop solution for non-TW content; is another really useful? Are there other serious objections?
I’m not volunteering. If we do decide to do this, and no one else steps up, I might be willing to try this, but not while I’m working on my Periodic Table, and that’s likely to last many more spare-time months before I get to a beta version. Plus I have two plugins that need some love to get to version 1.0
; and one of those may take some substantial work. But it sounds interesting, and if the community wants this, I would be interested in eventually trying this should no one else step forward.
What do you think?