Do you keep your tiddlers under source control? Alternately, do you have code with a source control history you would like to visualize? You might find Gource to be as interesting as I have.
If it is a tiddlywiki you are trying to visualize it helps if you are using node.js or another version that breaks out separate tiddler files. I found reviewing my tiddlywiki git history a trip down memory lane even in single file tiddlywiki.html days, however.
As examples, immediately below is a screen shot of my TW git history where I interpret the lobes as representing the evolution of home, work project notebooks, and shared tiddler collections. Purple are tid files, the pinkish spike some legacy single file tiddlywkis.
The screenshot below is what the end of TiddlyWiki5’s own git history looks like. These screen shots don’t do the visualizations the justice that a movie of gource running and the ability to poke at the visualization with a mouse would, however.
Be prepared to tweak the options to adjust the speed if visualizing a multi-year history like that of TiddliWiki’s git repo. Individual contributors will want to check out the various –*user* options. To visualize TiddlyWiki source code evolving in about a minute I found the following command line did the trick:
gource -s .01 --date-format "%D" -a .1 --max-files 0 --filename-time 2
At that speed the text display of files and contributors will not be of much use, however.
(Similar tools have been mentioned here before, as I recall, although searches on variations of ‘visualize’, ‘git history’, etc did not turn those up for me. I found the information presented reminiscent of some of the takeaways from Your Code as a Crime Scene) Enjoy!
