TiddlyWiki + nodejs: What are benefits and use cases?

[Charlie Veniot]

Hello all,

Knowing very little about nodejs other than having successfully installed it on Linux (a Linux container, or VM, on my Chromebook) and installed a working TiddlyWiki via npm, and not finding any "for dumb-dumbs" kind of info on the web ...

What are the benefits of using TiddlyWiki + nodejs versus the other possibilities?  What are great example use cases for TiddlyWiki + nodejs ?

BTW: I use only TiddlyWiki + TiddlyDrive.  (Well, I've used TiddlyDesktop just long enough to make sure it worked as an option for me.)

Thank-you much in advance!  Very appreciated.

[Mark S.]

In general, I find single file TW most practical. But the node version has these capabilities ...

• It doesn't need a special 3rd party saver.
• It's the only official way to share a TW over the local network.
• The local file system can search and manage tiddlers.
• Hypothetically it saves faster (but it loads slower, and sometimes fails to save on the network in my experience).
• Hypothetically commands can be launched locally since node is running locally. But it's not easy to set up (or at least I had problems).
• By loading different subsets you can support TW's that would be too big to run otherwise. For instance, you might have a library of dozens of books which would be too large to be practicable. But you could either load separate directories of tiddlers or filter what you load in order to make the TW practicable. So just all the works of Tolstoy rather than Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
• For synchronization via dropbox, etc., only changed tiddlers get updated.
• For development, you can switch out which version of  TW you are running. For instance, you might want the latest prerelease while developing a new set of tools, but go back to the regular version for production work.

[PMario]

On Friday, July 23, 2021 at 11:03:38 PM UTC+2 Mark S. wrote:

• It's the only official way to share a TW over the local network.

It's also possible to share single file wikis on windows, with built-in IIS server and WebDav. I did discuss the setup at youtube: https://youtu.be/tpkQhKyqPzc

IMO it's relatively easy to setup and works very well with a "single file wiki" served from a server

IIS is also able to be a "reverse proxy" that runs a tiddlywiki server at port 80, so you can access it with http://localhost ... I personally do use this setting, since it creates single tiddler files and the server is automatically started with windows. So it runs in the background is just there when I need it. I intend to use this version with the new SSE (server sent events) plugin from Arlen22, which will start to work with v5.2.0 ... 

So I should be able to edit the wiki from the main PC and the laptop at the same time.

-mario

[PMario]

Hi,

I think the main advantage is, that you can easily build and test the latest version of TW on your local PC.

It lets you serve binary files eg: images or PDFs from a /files directory, so you don't need to include them in your wiki.

With the new SSE plugin mentioned in the other post it will allow a basic multi user setup on the local network.

It can be used to build different editions, that are shipped with TW eg: empty.html, or the German version which is interesting for me ;)

It can be used to run tw5.com-server to improve the TW documentation and create pull-requests to improve the docs at tiddlywiki.com

So for me it's mainly a development environment and a playground for my own wikis.

-mario

[Charlie Veniot]

Just a goofy thought: if I wanted to serve binary files so they don't have to be included in a TiddlyWiki instance, my first instinct would be to setup a ridiculously tiny web server for static content.  (Any server similar to Web Server for Chrome or some tiny web server for Android.)

Well, that's one mindset of somebody who just uses TiddlyDrive.  Crazy to setup some tiny web server if one is already setup with nodejs?

Going wtih nodejs seems like a real no-brainer from a developer building TiddlyWiki-from-scratch angle.

[Mark S.]

Oh, yeah, add that to the feature list.

TW/node.js has a static file server. Not sure if it can serve up all file types. You could use a separate file server, but then you won't be able to use relative addresses and the addresses will be different from that of your main TW and probably subject to change when you switch to another desktop. Keeping it all under one umbrella makes things simpler.

[The Islander]

• For synchronization via dropbox, etc., only changed tiddlers get updated.

Dropbox has long switched to block based synchronization, so even for a single file TW on Dropbox, it will synchronize up only the changed blocks in the file so the sync should be very quick once the base file is already in cloud. Also, if you are into saving backups of a single TW file, when a new backup is saved, only the "new" blocks of the new single file will be synced up to Dropbox, not the whole file.

[Mark S.]

Ok, so then other synchronization services. Also, I imagine that block-level doesn't work if you use encryption, for instance.