Normally when I create a wiki, I have some general purpose in mind for it. But I just created one for general personal knowledge management. As such, it doesn’t have anything I’d consider worthy of a home page.
I chose the default tiddler option of preserving story ordering. I then enabled the Home/open default tiddlers button in the sidebar. But clicking this button doesn’t do anything.
What does this option do, and how does it relate to the home/default tiddlers button?
Thanks.
It just puts a filter into your default tiddler box that re-opens whatever tiddlers you were last (currently) working on. So you can re-open your TW file and immediately use your last set of tiddlers that you had opened.
As @Mark_S describes, this is the “Preserve/retain story option”. [list[$:/StoryList]] this filter gets the titles named in the list field of $:/StoryList
Personally I almost always drop my package Home and Contents.json (996 Bytes) on any new Wiki which adds the Home tiddler, adds the contents tab and modifies the default tiddlers to not open the last used.
FYI: Did you know the tiddler $:/config/EmptyStoryMessage is displayed when there is nothing in the story?
Thanks everyone.
I think what confuses me is that, when I click the button in the control panel to set that as my default, and when I check the “Open the default tiddlers” box in the Tools tab, nothing seems to happen when I click that button. I’ve created a few tiddlers and they don’t seem to show up anywhere. I’d expected that to show me something from which I could find the answer to this question myself, but it didn’t, so clearly I’m misunderstanding something else but don’t know what. 
Thanks again.
The story is the tiddlers open in tiddlywiki. If you save the wiki it will reopen them rather than start afresh. If there is not thing in the story there will be nothing in the story when you hit Home or reload the wiki.
I Tend to place a “Home” tiddler, in the default tiddlers.
If you use [list[$:/StoryList]] as your default tiddlers setting it only makes sense, if you want to open the “last session” list after a save – close the tab – reload the tab.
If the list is empty, when you save it will open an empty list.
If the story river shows tiddler-a tiddler-b and tiddler-c → save → close tab → open tab they will show up again. … It’s similar to the browser setting: “Startup: Open previous windows and tabs”
You can get a little of both worlds by putting this into your default tiddlers:
[list[$:/StoryList]]
[[HelloThere]]
Now if you close “HelloThere”, you can get it back, without changing your other tiddlers, by clicking the “Home” button.
If you have lots of different startup scenarios, it’s pretty easy to make a button in a sidebar tab that will let you save your current configuration for re-use. So you might have one set of tiddlers for school, another for a writing project, another for game cheat sheets, etc.
I’m intrigued by this possiblility. There are times when I definitely would like to go back to the last set of tiddlers I had open, but there are also times when I just want to start with my single home page.
Is this just a matter of saving off different versions of the story list and then writing that list to $:/DefaultTiddlers? What would be the most efficient way of doing this?
Ah, makes sense. Thanks everyone. I think I was hoping it’d list stories in some predefined order so I could see all my tiddlers in one place, maybe sorted by most recently edited or something. I’ll make my own tiddler for that.
Actualy this is a good opportunity to test my all button actions on the save wiki.
Each time we hit save or a custom button it stores the current storylist in a time stamped tiddler which can be renamed as a saved story, and reopened with a click.