Using Cecily in TiddlyWiki 5?

#1

So I’ve been digging around for interesting uses of TiddlyWiki in order to get some ideas for different ways I could improve my own use of it, and remembered that there was a port of cecily to TW5

Though, the ability to drag, double click to bring up the menu, these features seem to be missing, so when I try it I’m just sort of left with a couple of unusably small tiddlers :sweat_smile:

It got me thinking about ways that I would like to use it, what sort of keybinds, etc. and was wondering if development for Cecily in TiddlyWiki 5 is on a long hiatus?

I have a few ideas for it that I’d love to share, but figured asking if using cecily is an option should come first, since it really is a cool idea.

#2

Just for a quick example of some things I think would work nicely:

  1. mousewheel scrolling isn’t bound to up and down, but bound to zoom in and out, relative to where the mouse cursor is. Middle clicking will zoom out to all tiddlers.

  2. Tiddlers are layered based on their position in the storyriver / history, so dragging a tiddler higher up will bring it more to the front, but keep it’s small size, so the tiddlers can be layered, similar to the zoomin storyview

  3. tiddlers focused on will scroll as usual, same for the sidebar, which would appear like like a floating 1/4th tiddler on the side that stays it’s normal size even when dragging with mouse left click, or zooming with scrollbar

  4. fake 3D background effect for picture backgrounds, by having a picture placed 5 times (4 trapazoids with the slanted sides touching, the center filled in with the image) so it appears like the cecily layout is in a 3D space.

  5. hovering an internal link could draw a line to the tiddler it’s connected to (this one is more a concept rather than something I think possible, it would be above my experience level, certainly.)

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#3

Hi Justin,
Yes!!! This is something many of us are longing for! If we made up a vote on possible projects for future development, Cecily would be certainly among the top-three. It could be a vast enhancement of the possible use-cases of TW.

I am just building a classroom suite for TW and I am putting big hopes on @saqimtiaz to continue the development on something similar he called “floats”. To my mind in the TW5 cecily variant dragging and resizing Tiddler is the feature missing the most.

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#4

Have you looked at @Mohammad 's tweak of mentat?

#5

Hi @Ste_W thank you! This is a great proof of concept. I just checked it works in 5.3

But to my mind too much bricolage and too heavyweigt to rely on this for a project built to last and to be used by others.

For example it does not use use the latest features yet such as the cascade-mechanism or layouts which could certainly be usefull here but relies on a modified viewtemplate. So it can easily break in the future and cause heavy maintenance issues. I do not find Adam here in this forum? An update would be very usefull.

#6

Apologies, I just found out that the plugin is much smaller than I thought so I reconsidered. volanttiddlerswithoutRapid.json (58.7 KB)

It should be not so difficult to adapt it to the cascade mechanism to make it futureproof.

But I discovered some spooky aspects in the behaviour of this set. The control buttons do not seem to work in edit-mode in this set as well as the jump back to story button.

Update: The editcontrol buttons eve cease to work in the normal storyriver

Who can find the reason for this bug? Then this would be a really nice enhancement

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#7

I have played with it in the past, and while to doesnt play well with mobile devices from what i remember, it was really neat.

I dont remember if it had the ability to zoom in and out but thats one of the things I really enjoy about cecily.

It feels like a window into its own space, as silly as this might sound, like a pocket into a small bubble of space.