On Reflection this Topics title could be “Automatic Titles”, so you don’t need to name them. Streams is an example of automatic titles that are hidden, in some ways they are titleless, but not really. The fact is something like streams could have stored data in a data tiddler, and not even used titles, however it did use titles to make use of other features of using independent tiddlers.
There are other ways to handle the same or similar issues with titles, for example;
- a button you use for new tiddlers may appear on project tiddlers and create new tiddlers with “projectname task N” where in is incremented. You don’t have to change the titles as they are somewhat meaningful, as they are.
- An existing example of automatic titles in TiddlyWiki is the new journal button. It creates a new tiddler according to the pattern in “Title of new journal tiddlers”.
I am not worried about naming titles, especially ad hoc ones, but I have noticed some are reoccurring, and in some cases, I can reuse or update the existing tiddler, but in other cases I simply want to make the title unique.
- For example “go shopping” is going to reoccur many times, it makes sense to reopen this and use it again, rather than creating a new tiddler.
- But there are others that are reoccurring, where you want a unique title, for example let us say everyday you attended a “Change Management meeting”, one way to make this unique is to add a date to the title (like Jounals) eg: “Change Management meeting 13/05/2024”
I have been investigating an enhancement to provide a suite of tools on creating new tiddlers, or editing their titles which allow the user to select from a set of ways to make a title unique. For example;
- Date and or date time stamps
- Unique number available eg next free number like current new tiddler
- Or a universally unique number
- Or a domain, project unique number
- Any other useful scheme or context information
- One approach is to move the new tiddler button onto the New tiddler View template where we can also have access to context information. Eg, Adding task in a contect tiddler, may include the contacts name.
- Another approach is to manually add a suffix that indicates something about the title that will change later like end with a ?, but soon after you find the answer and give it a new title.