[TW5] Can tw5 have a better search and preview like Boostnote?

[Zhiheng Lin]

I've tried using TW5 (Node.js edition) to store my code snippets. But when I'm coding it's not convenient to find and copy my snippets. There are several steps I need to do:

* Launch a TW5 Node.js server

* Open the wiki in the browser

* Target to the search box and type something

* Open a tiddler that contains code snippets

* Select and copy the text I need

Today I incidentally find a note taking software called Boostnote. And I found it very suitable as a snippets manager. You can use a global shortcut to open a snippets finder, then search and preview the result, and even copy it directly in the preview panel. It's very fluent and convenient.

So there are several problems:

1. May we wrap Tiddlywiki in Electron so we can use global shortcut to easily bring the wiki to the front? (Compare to opening a browser and type the url)

2. If Electron is hard to achieve, may we have a better search and preview functionality in TW5?

3. What if the Node.js server expose some API so we can query the data using external programs?

[Danielo Rodríguez]

About the better search mechanism, you may want to check my context-search plugin:

http://contextplugin.tiddlyspot.com/

Will that address at least one of your concerns?

[Zhiheng Lin]

The plugin is awesome! It solve part of the preview problem. It would be better if we can preview the rendered content (not plain WikiText).

Anyway, thanks Danielo :-)

[Danielo Rodríguez]

Hello  Zhiheng Lin 

The plugin is awesome! It solve part of the preview problem.

Thank you

 

It would be better if we can preview the rendered content (not plain WikiText).

That is of course desirable, but it can lead to lots of problems: 

• The matching test may be a non-printable entity. For example a macro-call, a variable name and that stuff. So you will be missing information
  
• The matching tiddler may not fit on the space you have to render the content, which can be very problematic.
• Rendering just the portion that has the matching text will require tiddlywiki parsing to check that you don't leave closing braces out of the rendered content
• Highlighting the actual result will be also hard.  For example if the text that matches is part of a macro invocation, or maybe is inside a header, where should the highlight start/end? Very hard to decide progragmatically

Not to mention that once you find the correct tiddler that matches, the rendered content is just one click away.

Regards

[Zhiheng Lin]

So many thanks to your detailed explanation. I can see it's really difficult to handle.