Another editor in the ViewTemplate

[clutterstack]

Hello all,

I have just uploaded my personal take on a note-capturing macro. It's a small plugin to fire off tiddlers without having to click a lot or choose a title.

It's also a building block in a larger list- or document-composing interface (of course!), but in the first instance it is a focused environment to produce tiddlers with timestamps for titles, optionally pre-tagged, so that I could, for example, take notes on some reading in pure capture mode, without worrying about structure (or seeing what I've written before).

Why make this? I'd made a thing in Vue.js (while learning Vue.js) for capturing notes and tagging them. The output was tiddlers. In the end, the thing I wanted to make was a TiddlyWiki plugin, and so I am.

If anyone's curious to try it out, the demo is at https://clutterstack.github.io/TW5-quick/

Cheers,

Chris

[TW Tones]

Chris,

Thanks for sharing. You are right it is easy to use with minimum interface, nice. 

A few notes

• I am tempted to reduce the size to one line since it enlarges as needed anyway
• perhaps you could share some alternate examples of placing it in ones own tiddler, the sidebar etc..
• I would like a smaller toggle button, and perhaps it and the add tiddler line could follow the escape button to consume the minimum space until used

A few likes;

• I like tiddlers with titles based on the text entered, in some cases this is the best way to enter and access content.
• The escape feature
• The alternative title when desired.

I think your solution is quite elegant but believe it could be taken further for even more ease of use.

Thanks again for sharing.

TW Tones

[clutterstack]

TW Tones,

Thanks for taking the time to give such thoughtful feedback! I kept your comments in mind as I revisited this today.

• I am tempted to reduce the size to one line since it enlarges as needed anyway
  

You're right, it does! I had thought in testing that it didn't. Perhaps I messed that up in one of my other contexts. I've reduced it as far as I could by adding

rows="1" minheight="0"

to the edit-text widget. Both seem to be necessary to get the minimum height, and it still looks not quite minimal to me. I haven't decided whether I want this size universally, but it certainly has its advantages.

• perhaps you could share some alternate examples of placing it in ones own tiddler, the sidebar etc..

Right again: there are lots of possible places to put this, and even with such a tiny plugin the demo could be much more enlightening. I think when I first wrote this (to use on my phone), I may have had it in the TopLeftBar. That requires a bit more CSS, and I wanted to demo the plugin without changing the TiddlyWiki too much. The phone is the reason for the giant "submit" button, incidentally. I've updated the demo TW with more possibilities. I've run out of time for today before running out of documentation to iron out.

• I would like a smaller toggle button, and perhaps it and the add tiddler line could follow the escape button to consume the minimum space until used

I've added an alternative "slimline" layout accessible by setting a macro parameter. I wonder if it's more or less what you were picturing.

• I like tiddlers with titles based on the text entered, in some cases this is the best way to enter and access content.

Thus far, non-deliberately-titled tiddlers have timestamps for titles, with a macro to generate a label on demand. Putting nothing meaningful in the title does significantly degrade the vanilla search, and I must think more about sorting by my generated label. The label is not written to any field, which makes it tricky to sort in a list. I am assuming it would be reasonably easy to do with Javascript (by which I mean I could probably figure it out, given time). Another avenue might be to write labels to custom fields (or titles), and then figure out how to update them if the tiddler is changed (using a hook?). I can see myself looking at that later, but I have some other things in the queue ahead of it.

Cheers,

Chris

[Mat]

@clutterstack, thanks for sharing stuff.

You may find interest in my QuickTid plugin http://quicktid.tiddlyspot.com/

<:-)

[clutterstack]

Hi Mat,

Haha, I knew I wouldn't really be exploring uncharted waters. There's also some overlap in purpose with Drift, Streams, NotoWritey, and Stroll in the plugins I've been writing (and I'm hoping that when my macros are done, I can easily integrate some plugins from some of those to make my TW sweeter).

I do note that your plugin has the word "quick" in its name as well. I managed to miss that. I was aware that Eric Shulman had something called QuickNote some time ago, so my convenience macro ended up being called arrownote, not to duplicate that exactly. My Vue.js version was called RapidNotes, but it felt quicker to say "quick" in my head. :P And "rapid" is yet another common word for "fast", which surely someone has used as well. I momentarily called it "Rapids" (you know, like in a river where you might find tiddlers) but that seemed a bit contrived. I know, that's a lot of thinking over a macro name.

Thanks for the link. It is indeed a similar idea - fire off tiddlers quickly, without disturbing the story. I'm curious: do you use QuickTid in your current workflow?

Your newer SideEditor breaks out of the Story River linearity in a complementary way, I notice.

[Mat]

clutterstack wrote:

I do note that your plugin has the word "quick" in its name as well.

No problem for me personally, hopefully it won't cause confusion for others just.

 

I'm curious: do you use QuickTid in your current workflow?

I'm typically not in the environment where it is required, i.e where it it critical to take notes fast such as during a lecture. I did develop QuickTid further into rQuickTid (r=remote) which kind of serves both as a quick way to take notes but also as tool for writing to TW while working with other stuff - it needs to be coupled with a non TW-tool that sticks the editor at front of screen though, like DeskPins (the one I use).

Your newer SideEditor breaks out of the Story River linearity in a complementary way, I notice.

Yes, I find it interesting that there are several aspects to authoring. I think native TW is great at managing notes but not for taking notes. I'm working on improving these things - currently on EditorMagic with invaluable help from Saq. Soon to be released I hope.

<:-)

[clutterstack]

Oho, I think I do remember seeing rQuickTid! I didn't quite get what it was at the time. The separate satellite window is a very neat idea -- I can make my whole TW layout just an input tiddler, but separating it out while the parent wiki is open seems more interesting. I see you've also made the browser window cleaner.

Cheers,

Chris

[Saq Imtiaz]

@Clutterstack

Note that Streams is a plugin created to serve as a reference implementation for creating a tiddler hierarchy workflow with keyboard support. As such, please feel free to use anything in the code you may find useful.

Regarding UI ideas and separate windows you may find this interesting (the first minute or so):

https://youtu.be/lvnqgfvohfM?t=756

[clutterstack]

Hi Saq,

Thanks for the link. I admit I never made time to watch that hangout video before, but it was good. I love your Notation app.

I very much like your approaches in general, especially the keyboard integration. I'm trying not to look too much at Streams and NotoWritey, because I want to see whether I end up converging on the same thing or ending up with something different. Also because, before I started building, I hadn't learned enough about filters and variables in TW to really understand what I'm looking at. My list-making macros are pretty mature now, though messy. I'll be looking at Streams when I go to add keyboard support for rearranging tiddlers in a list.

I've already benefited from your contributions on the group (and those of many others), and also have to say I peeked at your GitHub to figure out how to package a plugin, and to see how you made your bullet points with CSS (ha!).

You mentioned learning JS from reading the TiddlyWiki Classic code -- I believe the first JS I ever wrote came from tweaking my TiddlyWiki starting in 2005 (hey, I had a dissertation to write). I did not (more's probably the pity) go through and understand the TW file. I let the JS internals be a bit mysterious to me for many years.

Coming back to it, I can't believe what we can now do using just WikiText macros. Even if sometimes it would be easier to write in JS than to figure out what is going wrong with my filter. :P

I've always agreed that TW's superpower is as a platform for building for your own personalised thing. Well, that and working locally. Two superpowers, at least. If anyone ever uses my own macro code, I expect it would be more as a basis to build what they want than as a packaged add-on.

Cheers,

Chris

[Saq Imtiaz]

Hi Chris,

 I'll be looking at Streams when I go to add keyboard support for rearranging tiddlers in a list.

If you have any questions at that time please feel free to ask.

Coming back to it, I can't believe what we can now do using just WikiText macros. Even if sometimes it would be easier to write in JS than to figure out what is going wrong with my filter. :P

Yes, incredibly powerful but hard to debug, that is my experience as well.

 Sometimes writing JS is still warranted, if what you need to do can't be done with wikitext or just isn't efficient enough. In those situations, it is a good idea to write JS in the form of re-usable widgets and macros and fill in the missing gaps in the functionality you need.

Cheers,
Saq

[clutterstack]

Thanks for that, Saq.