Comparing TiddlyWiki to X

[Jack Armitage]

Hello,

I've been trying to figure out where the future lies for me in terms of Wiki software. There are a few pieces of software I'd like to ask the community about in terms of how they stack up compared to TiddlyWiki if they have experience of any / all.

Firstly, did anyone move from Voodoo Pad to TiddlyWiki? My current feeling is that using Voodoo Pad would be about 5-10x faster than TiddyWiki just because of the editor. But that may be a false assumption. How fast do you Tiddle?

Next, is anyone here familiar with the work of Chris Granger / Kodowa and has been following the development of Eve? I'm excited about this and think people here will be too (links below)

Additionally, if anyone has used Ward Cunningham's Smallest Federated Wiki I'd be interested to hear how that went. It also has a WISYWIG editor but I've no idea what it's like to run locally.

EDIT: Also, any Emacs org-mode users want to compare?

And of course there's probably others I'm not aware of!

Thanks,

Jack

---

http://witheve.com/

"In Search of Tomorrow" talk on evolution of Eve https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQoAKJPbh8

[Mat]

Hi Jack

Firstly, did anyone move from Voodoo Pad to TiddlyWiki? My current feeling is that using Voodoo Pad would be about 5-10x faster than TiddyWiki just because of the editor. But that may be a false assumption. How fast do you Tiddle?

I have no experience with VoodooPad. How "fast you tiddle" I'd say depends on how/what you implement with TW (for example, I initiated an attempt called FastNewTiddler with this in mind... if it is finished, I think it would be very fast). Saving is probably a slower matter though, but I can think of options here too. However, overall, I'm sure many systems are faster than TW.
 

Next, is anyone here familiar with the work of Chris Granger / Kodowa and has been following the development of Eve? I'm excited about this and think people here will be too (links below)

I didn't watch the clip yet but from the link to Eve, it doesn't seem to be released yet? Is it even free and open source?

Additionally, if anyone has used Ward Cunningham's Smallest Federated Wiki I'd be interested to hear how that went. It also has a WISYWIG editor but I've no idea what it's like to run locally.

My impression has been that the SFW is only a prototype so far? It just appears rather unpolished but maybe I'm wrong. (Hope I'm not insulting anyone.) A major difference - if I understand right - is that it requires a server.

<:-)

[Jack Armitage]

Hi Mat,

I have no experience with VoodooPad. How "fast you tiddle" I'd say depends on how/what you implement with TW (for example, I initiated an attempt called FastNewTiddler with this in mind... if it is finished, I think it would be very fast). Saving is probably a slower matter though, but I can think of options here too. However, overall, I'm sure many systems are faster than TW.

Is speed not a goal for TW? I read a few posts on here where people are talking about Flow, do people here find that speed (or lack thereof) impacts their flow when using TW?

I didn't watch the clip yet but from the link to Eve, it doesn't seem to be released yet? Is it even free and open source?

Not yet released but being developed in the open as of now https://github.com/witheve/Eve/

My impression has been that the SFW is only a prototype so far? It just appears rather unpolished but maybe I'm wrong. (Hope I'm not insulting anyone.) A major difference - if I understand right - is that it requires a server.

That's kind of why I was asking, I was wondering if anyone had taken it farther than the prototyping stage. I guess not (yet!).

I'd love it if you could double click on a Tiddler to reveal it's source like in SFW. I think that would speed things up a great deal. Or maybe I haven't used it long enough to know why that would cause problems?

Jack

[Hegart Dmishiv]

Hi Jack,

I'd love it if you could double click on a Tiddler to reveal it's source like in SFW. I think that would speed things up a great deal.

Sorry, I don't understand how double-clicking on the tiddler would be faster than single-clicking on the "Edit this tiddler" icon.

Hegart.

[Jack Armitage]

Perhaps that wasn't descriptive enough of what I meant. Go to http://fed.wiki.org/ and double click on some text, and you get a mini-editor essentially per element. I think it's neat but how do you think it would fair in TW?

I guess another way of looking at this is I would like a plugin/edition that's focussed on the flow of the actual writing experience itself. So far editing in situ has been a bit too claustrophobic for me.

[Mark S.]

There is a plugin that will allow you to double click to open a tiddler. I used it for a week, but found it got in the way I use TW (I like to double-click inside of fields to select everything).

Any executable with an actual database behind it is going to be faster than a javascript file riding on top of a browser.

If you're always going to be running OSX on a single machine and don't mind shelling out money for upgrades then something like voodoo might be good for you. The problem with proprietary solutions is that your data can be trapped when the company decides to close shop, increase rates, etc. If you want to share with users on other operating systems, or your day job puts you on a different platform, then other solutions start looking better. If it was me, I would tend to prefer well-financed projects like Evernote or Microsoft One Note than with some small company where anything could happen.

TW shines when you want an open source, supported information manager that runs pretty much everywhere including mobile devices. It runs a little slower than dedicated applications but it's not too noticeable on desktops at reasonable sizes.

I can't imagine how TW's speed could be improved unless it is rewritten to use sqlite as a backend,  That would probably limit what browsers it could run on, though.

 -- Mark

[Jack Armitage]

Certainly openness and compatibility is a huge plus for TW.

Here I'm more concerned with the speed of editing, navigating, and other UX functions as opposed to the backend, which so far seems to be quite snappy.

I've just seen the Tiddler about keyboard shortcuts, for instance, which I think will be great in this context.

[Jeremy Ruston]

Hi Jack

Thanks for starting the discussion, and particularly for the pointer to Eve, which I hadn’t seen before. I think it shares with TiddlyWiki the goal of enabling people who are not conventional software developers to gather data, and explore/publish it by creating/composing a sort of custom application.

For me, the simplest expression of the limitation of most notetaking applications like VoodooPad, OneNote or Evernote is that the UI is fixed; if the generic, off-the-shelf UI doesn’t fit your workflow, there’s little you can do about it. TiddlyWiki’s approach is to use a dialect of wikitext that is powerful enough to express a modern web UI; indeed, the entire user interface is written in wikitext, and so can be hacked or cloned.

A deeper expression of the same limitation is that these tools let you gather and collate information, but they are not generative: you can’t use what you’ve collected to make anything.

This has a bearing on your question about speed: the point about TiddlyWiki is that you can craft the UI to match the way you work. You can customise it yourself, or use plugins and tweaks from others.

Anyhow, SFW and Eve are both very interesting to me. Smallest Federated Wiki started around the same time as TiddlyWiki5, and is focussed on devising a protocol for federating wiki pages. It is perhaps a little less polished than TW as an end-user tool, but it has a formidable community and is worth watching.

Eve seems to be more focussed on structured data than TiddlyWiki but to share broadly similar goals.

Having said all of that, for me the most important consideration in adopting TiddlyWiki for personal use is the future-proofness, and lack of lock-in. Knowing that your data is in a simple HTML format, and that you can view it in any browser is quite reassuring. Here’s a recent article discussing the point:

http://www.networkworld.com/article/3028098/open-source-tools/tiddlywiki-a-free-open-source-wiki-revisited.html

In terms of double-click editing, that’s a feature we had in the earlier version of TiddlyWiki but have removed from the core because of the way that it interferes with double-clicking to select text. As noted above, there is a plugin to enable the feature for TW5.

Best wishes

Jeremy

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[Jack Armitage]

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks for TW and thanks also for this response. Funnily enough I noticed in another thread you were discussing Tidal – I'm actually a Tidal user and former colleague of it's creator Alex Mclean @ Leeds Uni. Small world!

Thanks for starting the discussion, and particularly for the pointer to Eve, which I hadn’t seen before. I think it shares with TiddlyWiki the goal of enabling people who are not conventional software developers to gather data, and explore/publish it by creating/composing a sort of custom application.

This is one of the things that drew me to TW, as I am also behind the idea that we have to 'change programming and not people' as it were (in this regard I'm also a fan of Bret Victor who you'll find interesting if you haven't yet seen his work).

For me, the simplest expression of the limitation of most notetaking applications like VoodooPad, OneNote or Evernote is that the UI is fixed; if the generic, off-the-shelf UI doesn’t fit your workflow, there’s little you can do about it. TiddlyWiki’s approach is to use a dialect of wikitext that is powerful enough to express a modern web UI; indeed, the entire user interface is written in wikitext, and so can be hacked or cloned.

That's looking at it the other way, and yes I would agree. More often than not this is the primary reason why I leave a piece of software behind.

Eve seems to be more focussed on structured data than TiddlyWiki but to share broadly similar goals.

I already see some convergence between the two. I saw a Tiddler somewhere mentioning natural language algebra being a long-term goal, which is where I think Eve is headed (e.g. operations like 'Queen minus female plus male equals king'). It will be fascinating to follow both projects anyway.

Jack

[Jeremy Ruston]

Hi Jack

Thanks for TW and thanks also for this response. Funnily enough I noticed in another thread you were discussing Tidal – I'm actually a Tidal user and former colleague of it's creator Alex Mclean @ Leeds Uni. Small world!

Even smaller; I used to attend and sometimes speak at Dorkbot in London in the early 2000s, when Alex was one of the two organisers. 

Thanks for starting the discussion, and particularly for the pointer to Eve, which I hadn’t seen before. I think it shares with TiddlyWiki the goal of enabling people who are not conventional software developers to gather data, and explore/publish it by creating/composing a sort of custom application.

This is one of the things that drew me to TW, as I am also behind the idea that we have to 'change programming and not people' as it were (in this regard I'm also a fan of Bret Victor who you'll find interesting if you haven't yet seen his work).

I’m indeed a huge fan of Bret’s work, and his writing.

Thanks again for the reference to Eve,

Best wishes

Jeremy

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[newbie]

Hello,

from my short use of TW5 it shines in two points

1. easy transclusion gives you as author of your wiki control over the granularity with which your structure your text. Most other systems give you only limited or no control at all. This is important because later on you may find connections between some pieces, you didn't see during the first or second write-up.
2. story view lets "pull some cards from the slip box" and arrange them in a completely new way compared to inital write-up. You can make new associations between tiddlers and think about them. This is nearly impossible with tree structures.

Another important point is the ability to read your wiki in 15 or 20 years when all the great systems have faded away for different reasons. I used "electronic index cards" since Hypercard and Tornado Notes and spent many days moving my stuff to the next great system.

Regards,

newbie

[Jack Armitage]

Can people share there favourite examples of transclusion and stories?

I grasp the concepts but it would be great to see some deeply crafted examples from experienced users

Or another way to put it: 'canonical' TiddlyWikis, across a range of subjects

[Hegart Dmishiv]

Hi Jack,

I won't admit to being an "experienced user", neither would I say my results are "canonical", but I've been messing about in Prof. Steve Schneider's {{DesignWrite}} class, and have put together some examples from the courseware, of using transclusion. My favourite, (although not yet fully implemented), is a traditional essay template, which I built using a spreadsheet, exporting it to CSV, then converting the CSV to JSON, and importing all the tiddlers at once from the JSON file into my TiddlyWiki. The tiddlers under my traditional essay tiddler are all set up for transclusion. For instance, if you were to add text to the first supporting statement — topic tiddler, it would transclude up to the first supporting statement tiddler, and onwards up to the evidence paragraphs tiddler.

Enjoy,

Hegart.

[Jed Carty]

My favorite use of transclusions I have made is still the settings for my contacts plugin. Go here (http://inmysocks.tiddlyspot.com/#%24%3A%2Fplugins%2Finmysocks%2FDashboard%2FDashboard), click or 'Contacts' from the list on the left, go to the settings tab in what appears and play with the drop down menus. That is all done by transclusions.
There is also the interactive fiction engine I made using tiddlywiki which is built using lots of transclusions (http://zorklike.tiddlyspot.com/)
Another example I made is the resume builder edition. All of the navigation is done using transclusions and the preview is built using them. (http://tiddlywiki.com/editions/resumebuilder/index.html)

I am only one person, but here is a list of many of the things I have made. I need to update it to include my newer stuff.
http://ooktech.com/jed/ExampleWikis/Directory.html

[Jack Armitage]

Really fascinating, thanks. I was wondering if anyone had attempted to make IF with TW and lo and behold.

Will take me a while to get through your collection!

[Jack Armitage]

For anyone interested in Eve, they posted an early demo:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/eve-talk/F4NhgXaqLTU

[Jeremy Ruston]

Hi Jack

That's great, thanks for sharing, Eve is definitely worth a look for anyone interested in TiddlyWiki. I think there might be scope to integrate the underling database and search functionality with the TW extensible user interface.

Best wishes

Jeremy

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Jeremy Ruston

jer...@jermolene.com

http://jermolene.com

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[Jack Armitage]

Wow that's an interesting idea. Could you say a bit more about how that would work?

Also are you familiar with hypothes.is? I've started using it recently and quite like it.

The only problem is that it is lacking a Wiki backend! They have a simple looking API, do you think it would be possible to sync annotations to a TW? Even better if it would be possible to transclude the original page

[Alex Hough]

Jeremy et al.,

I like the way Eve [1]has spilt the "edit" and "add" functions. The slide in edit icon on the side is nice too

Alex

[1] http://early.witheve.com/#/engineering/AUTOGENERATED_engineering_THIS_SHOULDN'T_SHOW_UP_ANYWHERE

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