Fantasy: Instantly create link

[Mat]

Usually I ponder a lot before I post about new ideas but this one was 30 seconds ago so FWIW:

Often reading some article I select a word, do right-click and in the popup select "search Google for ...". I assume it is a Chrome feature.

What if we could do "Create link+tiddler" in the same way? I.e select any text portion and right-click and... etc.

Currently, only missing links can come close which is not optimal since they had to be both predicted and constructed before hand.

Possible?

<:-)

[A Gloom]

What if we could do "Create link+tiddler" in the same way? I.e select any text portion and right-click and... etc.

Nice idea, one I would be interested in-- I usually use the excise tool it allows creation of a new tiddler and leaving a link to it in the original -- but it works in edit mode not view.

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Mat wrote:

Often reading some article I select a word, do right-click and in the popup select "search Google for ...". I assume it is a Chrome feature.

What if we could do "Create link+tiddler" in the same way? I.e select any text portion and right-click and... etc.

Currently, only missing links can come close which is not optimal since they had to be both predicted and constructed before hand.

Can I clarify? So I'm clear what you mean?

You mean IN TW? Or for on-line articles?

Best

TT

[Mat]

@TiddlyTweeter wrote:

You mean IN TW? Or for on-line articles?

Oh, I meant in TW. The main idea is to have the selected segment become a link so you wouldn't have to think (predict) these things when editing the tiddler.

<:-)

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Mat wrote:

Oh, I meant in TW. The main idea is to have the selected segment become a link so you wouldn't have to think (predict) these things when editing the tiddler.

I think there was a discussion some long time ago, if I recollect correctly, that had code for some proto solutions to a similar issue. But I can't find it yet :-(.

TT 

[PMario]

hmm, In edit mode, it is an existing toolbar button. ... So I'm not sure, what you want to achieve.

-m

[TonyM]

I too think it exists already but that may be the way I read the original post.

Mat can you restate your request in different words or a specific example?

The greater problem for me was url links. If you drag and drop them or copy ctrl-v on tiddly wiki it creates an untitled (n) tiddler containing the link. I have a button that appears on untitled tiddlers to convert this to a custom link tiddler.

Regards
Tony

[PMario]

Hi,

I was thinking about a browser addon, that will save a xxxx.tid.json file, that contains the selected text as title-field, an optional description and the URL as url-field. Those files can be easily imported into every TW.

As far as I can remember, there is a extension-api, that allows us to create custom "right-click" menus.

-m

[David Gifford]

People are asking for clarification. I think Mat is asking for

1) In TiddlyWiki

2) in read view, not edit view (this is the part I may be wrong about)

3) Select text in a tiddler

4) Right-click

5) Appears a menu option 'Create link+tiddler'

6) Click, and the text turns into a link and the tiddler is created with that title

Is this correct?

[Mark S.]

BJ's tiddlyclip can be used on the same TW that you're currently in, quickly creating a new tiddler from existing text. You can get the

link from the "recent" tab.

[Mat]

Yeah, David got it.

View mode, not edit mode. You read and suddenly realize you want a segment (e.g a word) to be a link. Possibly also with an accompanied creation+navigation to a tiddler with that title that opens in edit mode - but I suspect the former part to turn the word into a link is the trickier part. I guess the mechanism would have to figure out what is selected and then go into the underlying text (the "edit text") and modify it to be bracketed.

As stated, it is a fantasy - but I think you'll agree it would be useful.

<:-)

[Mat]

Mark S. wrote:

BJ's tiddlyclip can be used on the same TW that you're currently in, quickly creating a new tiddler from existing text. You can get the

link from the "recent" tab.

Getting the "link string" from the recent tab is an interesting idea... but if there is such a tiddler, then I must assume the system has already manipulated that very string... but perhaps the point is to access the string within native TW? Regardless, I'd expect the main problem to be to have the current tiddler modified from view mode. I'd think the mechanism would have to copy the full text and then do a search-and-replace for the selected string into a bracketed one and add this text to the tiddler.

<:-)

[Mark S.]

I didn't know you wanted the current tiddler modified. That's not in Dave's list. Since you can't navigate to structures inside of tiddlers, I'm

at a loss what good the link would do you? But I've only given it 28 seconds of thought ...

[Eric Shulman]

On Tuesday, October 22, 2019 at 7:03:20 AM UTC-7, Mat wrote:

I'd think the mechanism would have to copy the full text and then do a search-and-replace for the selected string into a bracketed one and add this text to the tiddler.

One big problem: Even though the selected string is visible in view mode, the actual source of that text might not even be contained in the current tiddler.  It might be transcluded from another tiddler.  It might also be generated by a macro or widget, so there wouldn't be anything that could be "bracketed" to create the link.

-e

[Mat]

Mark S. wrote:

I didn't know you wanted the current tiddler modified. That's not in Dave's list. Since you can't navigate to structures inside of tiddlers, I'm

at a loss what good the link would do you? But I've only given it 28 seconds of thought ...

Sure, Dave writes

6) Click, and the text turns into a link and the tiddler is created with that title

The point is to get a link but in a more spontaneous way than the usual edit-mode linking. This way you wouldn't (quite as much) have to think about creating links while you're authoring the text.

I typed this reply in a mere 2.3 seconds, with my left foot and blindfolded. Man, this is stressing me out.

<:-)

[Mat]

Eric Shulman wrote:

...might be transcluded from another tiddler.  It might also be generated by a macro or widget,

Ah, in deed! A fantasy it shall remain. 

<:-)

[Mark S.]

Notching it up away from fantasy, I can imagine a 3rd view/edit mode, "Slicer mode". Similar to the slicer edition. You can click on paragraphs and have options to convert it to a

transcluded link. The slicer might put interior macros or transclusions into their own paragraphs, giving some work-around to the problem Eric notes.

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Mark, Eric & Mat

Wondering if a transclusion "knows" it is one? :-)

Mark, not sure if you remember, but you and BTC came up with some interesting proofs of concept of direct jumps to tranclusions (& proto transclusions & potentially macro content) from view mode. The suggestive discussion is here: Communicating to writers the benefits of TW

What struck me about Mat's Fantasy is it seems part of the same desire to "stay-in-flow", rather than having to segway to get stuff done?

I realise its not the same thing exactly as the OP, but the general impulse seems the same.

Thoughts

TT 

[Diego Mesa]

On this note, I've always thought Tobias' "INC" plugin should be part of the core:

https://tobibeer.github.io/tw5-plugins/#inc

"Enhance transclusion by including tiddlers with an on-hover toolbar"

[PMario]

On Tuesday, October 22, 2019 at 6:30:52 PM UTC+2, @TiddlyTweeter wrote:

Mark, Eric & Mat

Wondering if a transclusion "knows" it is one? :-)

From the HTML text, that you see in ViewMode - _no_

Transclusions intentionally don't create visible or invisible artefacts. ... They did in very, very early alpha versions but that caused a plethora of problems.

The internal "parse-tree" knows it for text content, but there is no real connection from parse-tree back to source text.

-m

[Mark S.]

At the heart of it all is a certain discontent with the two-mode aspect of TW.

Everything Mat asks for is already available in edit mode.

[Jeremy Ruston]

As a historical note, at the start of TW5 development in 2010/11 I was determined to make it a WYSIWYG editor. The main problem I ran into was that at that time the so-called "contentEditable" feature was unreliable and inconsistent across different browsers. That's different now, happily.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement/contentEditable

The next problem was architectural: that using "contentEditable" produces HTML. The problem of reliably converting arbitrary HTML to wikitext is quite thorny, and I wanted to avoid getting bogged down in it.

Finally, while working through it, I realised that even with a WYSIWYG editor, we'd still need separate view and edit modes. Consider a tiddler that contains some text with a transclusion somewhere within it. In view mode, the reader sees a seamless block of text, with no indication of the presence of the transclusion. Imagine that the user wants to change the transclusion to reference a different tiddler. For that, the user needs to see a visual representation of the transclusion itself so that they can interact with it and edit it. Given the need for transclusions to be invisible in normal use, all of that implies a separate mode in which widgets are editable rather than rendered as usual.

So, straightforward blocks of text containing formatting like bold and italic could be directly edited without needing to flip into edit mode, but some actions would require it.

Allowing direct editing of rendered output presents some difficulties, too. With the above example, imagine if the user selects text that spans the text of the transclusion and the surrounding text and then tries to delete it. Perhaps that would translate into deleting text from two separate tiddlers, but that seems counterintuitive for users.

A recent commercial project I've undertaken as Federatial (https://federatial.com) for law firm client required a WYSIWYG editor, but they were happy to use HTML as their content format, so I have developed a very simple HTML WYSIWYG editing widget based on https://quilljs.com. At some point I'll polish it up for more general use.

Best wishes

Jeremy.

--

Jeremy Ruston

jer...@jermolene.com

https://jermolene.com

On 23 Oct 2019, at 14:57, 'Mark S.' via TiddlyWiki <tiddl...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

At the heart of it all is a certain discontent with the two-mode aspect of TW.

Everything Mat asks for is already available in edit mode.

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[A Gloom]

The separate edit/view modes is an inconvience for those working on the content, but for single file TW, its valuable when it comes to offering the content to viewers/users that usually don't need to edit (and probably shouldn't-- most of my end users have no clue even how to operate TW but they need the content in the way TW can deliver it).

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Ciao Jeremy & Mark S.

FYI, my interest in this is NOT wysiwig v. "whatever-mode". The current division of edit v. view looks fine to me.

I think that Mat's OP was an extreme case of  wanting from view to change tiddler somewhere-in-line text content outside edit mode entirely. 

I can't see the proven need or how that would work better than just "edit".

BUT an issue it raised, implicitly, was how IN edit you insert things that COULD be more easily manipulated from view-mode later ... e.g.  "<<select-action-for "Tiddler 467">>".

I think the issue is at root as much about the experience of editing as anything. Its about FLOW. 

Take an example. I know a lot about movies. I do not need to research anything when writing. But I do need to provide (later) heavy linking I will need to look up. But when I write I just want a "placeholder" for that linking stuff I will fill-in later, as well as how it is presented.

The point being I want to write without segways into building other, referenced Tiddlers in advance. Too distractive from flow of writing.

All I need is a way to activate later, from View Mode (i.e. fully in context), via click. For that I need "placeholders" inserted in edit (a macro that can, in theory, manipulate its referenced content in innumerble ways).

Mark S. & BTC gave a couple of examples in the direction that interested me some time ago: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/tiddlywiki/B0VGpW27MC4/bNVAKOxCCQAJ

The point is that from View Mode you could set/reset a Tiddler as a block transclusion, an inline transclusion, a local link, a remote link, or in-context edit it etc, WITHOUT segway. 

Here is a screenshot of the thing at work in an experiment of mine ...

Best wishes

TT

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