What do people use Tiddlywiki for?

[DaveGifford]

I use TiddlyWiki…

…to keep track of information I need to have on hand for work
…as a to do list
…for taking notes on reading
…for processing the brainstorming which I write by hand
…for tracking my reading progress across my books
…to produce web materials at Índice central — giffmex.org/b/, some as static htmls
…for the website for my wife and me https://giffmex.org
…for experimenting with new things produced by everyone here
…for documenting how to do things in TiddlyWiki, here: Documenting TW — a non-linear personal web notebook

[TiddlyTitch]

@Bob_Jansen

what you use TW for.

1 — To understand you too.

2 — To do most everything that a bachelor might in a frugal situation.

[Chan_Droid]

I use TiddlyWiki to…

• Keep a listing of Obituaries of Actors, Musicians, Authors, Celebrities that were of interest to me.

• ‘Recreating’ Webpages, Articles, News Clippings.

• Cataloging Custom Content from The Sims games.

• (Beginning) to catalog my eBook Collection - I use Calibre, but I’d like more control over what is displayed, how it’s formatted onscreen, and how additional files (alternate/back covers, misc. art, videos and other errata) are stored and displayed. (my library is currently at nearly 10,000 books - would love it if there were a simple way to convert Calibre’s opf files into tiddlers, without having to edit each one by hand…)

• (Ongoing (Never-Ending? lol) Trial-and-Error Process) Trying to record and keep track of Purchases, both Online and from brick & mortar stores.

• Constantly attempting to push the envelope with new and creative HTML and CSS things within Tiddlers!

And many more various and sundry things…

I’m planning to begin taking my 10+ year records of Movie and TV Show viewing logs from a program named RedNotebook and convert them into Tiddlers so I can add Posters, DVD/Blu-Ray Cover Art, Screenshots, etc., and have the ability to easily add Comments, Notes, Reviews, whatever in fields so it’s all searchable. Thanks for the idea, @Lamnatos !

Oh, and @Springer – I LOVED your Tiddler with the Google Fonts - I have something similar (but much more crude) in one of my reference Tiddlers, but I’m going to steal borrow some ideas from yours
Also (maybe in a separate thread…?) could you perhaps explain a bit more or show some examples of how you did the Field as TextArea? – I’ve long desired to have this functionality as I have several TW’s that make use of Fields, some with ridiculously large amounts of text/HTML/CSS, and it’s a real pain when having to edit them, as you can only see the single line of content at once…
I’m sure the implementation is probably a very simple matter, but I’m just not seeing/getting it. I pasted the code into a Tiddler and it worked, of course, but the actual code itself then appears - How would I incorporate it globally so that I could use it in any Tiddler, and without the code showing?

[nosycat]

Belatedly, I don’t use TW5 at this time (had an experimental one but it didn’t go anywhere and a rogue crawler forced me to take it down). However, I use the Classic edition and competing apps for purposes like:

• worldbuilding (most frequently)
• personal wiki and knowledge base
• guerilla wiki / site-in-a-bottle

Been circling TW5 again now that performance gains in 5.3.7 make it more attractive, but likely for other similar projects, not anything substantially different.

[TiddlyTitch]

@nosycat

I don’t use TW5 at this time

Classic had/has the same girding as TW later has. Looks good to me.

Both are very agnostic.

Meaning their main architecture avoids “cloud-dependency” and “sharing too early”.

I’m much interested in @jeremyruston’s holding-fast to not becoming a big-bucks “influencer”.

Eek! This post reads a bit paranoid.

@nosycat

• worldbuilding (most frequently)
• personal wiki and knowledge base
• guerilla wiki / site-in-a-bottle

Right.
What World are you currently building?

Best, TT

p.s. Nose Is an interesting word. Your cat may “Nose about” being “Nosy” but is it ever “NosEy”? Nosy v. Nosey.

[johncrwarner]

I use my TW as mostly a reading notebook. It started when I was in hospital in 2022 with COVID - I took all the vaccinations but I when they tested me had none of the anti-bodies!
I was in for a week and had my phone and was looking for a lightweight non-linear note taking app for a reading project I was doing. I found TW and installed it on my Android phone using the node.js form and running the server on my Termux app and using the browser as the client.

It started as a specific reading project - I was sixty and reading books written in 1962 my birth year.
When I got home I started adding to a separate Instance of TW my general reading.

I learnt to merge the two instances and created the current one. It focuses on books but is likely to grow.

Firstly to record music/CDs as well as DVDs - then other stuff.

I treat it with backlinks as a Zettelkasten - based on the ideas of Niklas Luhmann who was a local professor here.

[TiddlyTitch]

@johncrwarner

It started as a specific reading project - I was sixty and reading books written in 1962 my birth year.
When I got home I started adding to a separate Instance of TW my general reading.

I learnt to merge the two instances and created the current one. It focuses on books but is likely to grow.

Firstly to record music/CDs as well as DVDs - then other stuff.

What stands out in this is “personal development” with a “practical tool” (TW) to help.

Am I intuiting correctly?

Best, TT

[johncrwarner]

Most certainly I have the personal motto that “Learning Never Ends” and I have found that TW is an easy mechanism to enhance learning.

[nosycat]

Ah, a fellow fan of linguistics. I didn’t exactly think things through with my current nick. It’s just become a default in recent years. And yeah! Being able to show off that experiment was the reason for keeping it online at all. Turned out, the current trend of out-of-control, misbehaving crawlers was just starting, and TW5 confused them to no end.

As for worldbuilding projects, I’m currently working on The Dream, but my very first TW project in 2007 was also a fictional setting (and I have a third one made with Feather Wiki that’s not active at this time).

[TiddlyTitch]

@nosycat

The Dream

Footnote: The Dream Is very responsive.

[TiddlyTitch]

@johncrwarner

I have found that TW is an easy mechanism to enhance learning.

Right!

To me It Is interesting because TW has none of the baggage that other approaches do.

What do I mean? TW has no motivated theory of what It means to be a human.

[Mohammad]

TiddlyWiki is a highly flexible tool used for everything from journaling and research to documentation and teaching. Its single-file design and modularity make it ideal for customizing to fit any workflow.

Here are some examples from my own custom-built editions:

Course Edition

Stores syllabus, exams, solved problems, homework, and resources — great for managing academic materials.

Mehregan Edition (Zettelkasten)

A second brain for personal knowledge management using atomic notes and backlinks.

Tirgan Edition (Scientific Notes)

Equipped with BibTeX, KaTeX, and Refnotes — ideal for technical and academic work.

Notebook Edition

Used for gardening logs, recipes, and DIY projects — a general-purpose life organizer.

Basic Edition

A minimal setup for TiddlyWiki development and prototyping.

Vanilla Edition

Clean slate for quick mockups, flyers, and experiments.

XP Edition

Student-friendly version for class projects and group assignments.

Krystal Edition

An e-manual for documenting in-house tools like FBR-Sim (Fixed Bed Reactor Simulation).

---

I generate and manage these editions using a PowerShell script, which builds both normal and minified versions for easy distribution.

TiddlyWiki adapts to how you think — whether you’re a researcher, developer, student, or gardener.

[stefan_from_germany]

In an industrial environment as a combination of Wiki, Compliance Management System and Tracking Tool

[Springer]

@Chan_Droid

Also (maybe in a separate thread…?) could you perhaps explain a bit more or show some examples of how you did the Field as TextArea ?

Sorry I overlooked your question! I’ve added more explanation to the link you cited, but also…

Open for more details (since this is a tangent from main thread)

Oops, I failed to document and credit the source of that modification. Here’s a basic documentation on how the field-editor can be changed, based on cascade conditions.

When you say

@Chan_Droid

I pasted the code into a Tiddler and it worked, of course, but the actual code itself then appears - How would I incorporate it globally so that I could use it in any Tiddler, and without the code showing?

It sounds like you pasted the code from the edit-template into your tiddler. You want that template to be used (transcluded) by TiddlyWiki wherever you’re editing certain fields. The edit-template is a tiddler like this:

title: $:/config/EditTemplateFields/Templates/textarea
text: <$edit-text tiddler=<<currentTiddler>> field=<<currentField>> tag="textarea" class="tc-edit-texteditor tc-edit-fieldeditor" placeholder="field value" tabindex={{$:/config/EditTabIndex}} cancelPopups="yes"/>

Getting it to display in the edit-fields mode requires creating a cascade condition tiddler, which looks like this:

title: Field as TextArea [or a title starting $:/cascade, etc.]
tags:  $:/tags/FieldEditorFilter
text: [listed[textfields]then[$:/config/EditTemplateFields/Templates/textarea]]
list-before:

Using the tag $:/tags/FieldEditorFilter is most important! That’s what gets this into the right cascade. (Creating a list-before field but leaving it blank ensures the cascade orders it before the default field-editor.)

Basically, this cascade-condition tiddler says: "Where fields are being edited, IF the fieldname is listed in a field named textfields, THEN use THAT template.

I set it up this way (scanning across any field named textfields) because even if you have certain fieldnames in mind when you set tihs solution up (so you add a textfields field to the template tiddler) — perhaps you’re later working on something else and suddenly want a generous text area for a new field, and it would be a distraction to go find and modify that template tiddler. Instead, you can just go ahead and make a textfields field there (whatever tiddler you are working on), and enjoy the effect.

[Chan_Droid]

Thank You so much for the additional info, @Springer - I will pore over this soon

[AlfieA]

A little teaser. Anybody interested in Japanese or Chinese characters (written)?

Kanji, the Chinese written characters that’s used in Chinese, Japanese, Korean names and some other languages is notoriously difficult to look up. There are conventional methods which usually involve them being categorized by their “hen”, or “radical”. Another is by the number of strokes. Sometimes the radical is obvious. More often, though, it is not.

I recall a day, many years ago, looking for a kanji that turned out to be completely foreign and not in my dictionary. I spent many hours looking for it. I never forgot that experience; if that gives an indication of how frustrating it was.

There are now multitudes of online apps and web browser add-ons that address the issue.

But…

“What do people use TiddlyWiki for?” Well, I am developing a code to help look up Kanji.

So, here is the teaser:

Can you see this: 九? It means “nine”. It has two strokes.

Ok. How would one look that up in a dictionary? Well, most likely they would not because they would already have learned it. Would you look up “nine” in the dictionary?? Of course not.

But, 九 is made of two strokes. Question is: which stroke comes first? Well, in this case, the vertical (top to bottom) comes first.

Still with me?

Now comes the magic. Imagine a grid of 3x3.

123
456
789

The first stroke ノ comes from the sector “2”. The last stroke (in this case: the second stroke) comes from sector “4”. Are you still with me?

So, the kanji could be found by using “24”. The number of strokes is 2. So, it would be “2402”. Finally, the reading of that character (and there are a number of readings) would be “kyuu”. So the first two roman characters would be added to the code. The result of which would be: 2402ky.

There are around 2500 daily use Japanese kanji characters. I am in the process of encoding them. I’m just about 20% done. Not just for foreigners, but for the Japanese themselves. And for Chinese, too. TiddlyWiki is the vehicle that’s making the look-up possible.

I will keep you posted. If you are interested in the “list” I have, please contact me.

Thank you for reading.

[Ste_W]

That’s an epic undertaking!

[AlfieA]

Your comment means a lot! Thank you.

[AlfieA]

Thank you, Mario! (for splitting the topic)