Hi Amy,
>>> What I'm most troubled about is Streams. Since it auto-generates titles,
I think it would be a hassle to manually change the labels on mind
maps. Is it possible to display a more descriptive title in mind maps by
changing the label for some/all nodes to the field 'alt-title'? Do you
have other suggestions?
You can change the label for all nodes at once by going to Menu > Configure TiddlyMap > Field settings then change "Node-label field" to whatever field you want. By default it is the "caption" field, and I think if the field is empty it reverts to the title.
I'm not sure how this would help you though. If you displayed the field "alt-title" instead, you would still have to manually add descriptions to the field for every node. Maybe I have misunderstood you?
It depends on exactly how you want to use TiddlyMap, but to keep it clean you could exclude all of the tiddlers that have auto-generated titles. Then you could just use TiddlyMap to relate tiddlers that you have actually given names to. Just ask if you need any help doing this. Personally when I use Streams I will tend to think of the individual nodes as part of the larger (named) tiddler, even though they are technically individual tiddlers.
>>>
I've been considering Streams because I want to keep tiddlers short and
reusable. I've had difficulty with creating unique, descriptive titles
for every small subtopic, and ctrl+E to paste content into new tiddlers
is not as fast as Streams' method. But I don't think I really understand
why Streams is valuable, as I've never learned about TW in-depth. Can
you tell me its benefits and use-cases?
Sounds like you have given a good example of a benefit of Streams right there! TiddlyWiki is so flexible that it is hard to define any standard use cases. Personally I find that Streams is really nice for helping me to make sense of messy thoughts by spewing them onto a page and then dragging them around to try to build structure out of them. If I notice that a particular node contains an important idea, I will give it its own name.