Query -- Who is the competition?

[@TiddlyTweeter]

When you, experienced people, look at the rivals to TiddlyWiki ... what would you say they were?

It can be as loose as you like. I'm simply trying to better understand TiddlyWiki's main market sector.

Josiah

[h0p3]

Flexible text editors are major competitors. Emacs and vim ecosystems are solid examples. These are the only kinds of tools that ever force me to question whether or not I should move away from Tiddlywiki, especially when going the nodejs route. Tiddlywiki competes with these text editors in attempting to mimic or overlay an operating system; they are that powerful. We still don't know how WASM is going to change the web (https://github.com/rhysd/vim.wasm), but these competitors may become even stronger. TW is not as performant, CLI-oriented and connectable, or flexible in many contexts, and it doesn't have decades of maturity (software older than I am which is still chosen to be used today must be incredibly fit). TW tends to be more unified, portable (in some respects), visually appealing; more importantly, it comes batteries-loaded alongside a radically better learning curve.

I suppose I use Tiddlywiki as primarily just-a-bunch-of-linked-textfiles with reasonable media interaction, sexy markup, sane defaults, low-hanging fruit plugins, and some automated sprankles on top. In a way, the more backend programmatic I want to be, the less I want to use Tiddlywiki. Often, when I feel the need to leverage the enormous commandline ecosystems available, I think it makes sense to just avoid the browser (though terminal emulators work fine enough in the browser) which inconveniently bottlenecks me with a VM that has to be bypassed.

That said, I'm a hardcore fanboi, and it seems crazy to me that most people don't use TW. When I am a Tiddlywiki Apostle to my friends and family, I've often found they think it's too much work and it lacks the name recognition/network effect for them to take the risk of committing themselves to it. Tiddlywiki seems born for those who want to be able to own their tooling, data, and personal clouds. Most people don't care (I'm not claiming that is justified). In a way, the real competition that prevents TW uptake are specialized tools like Evernote which are so convenient; it takes 2-3 clicks to be sitting in a living-breathing driver's seat.

TW competes with the sledgehammer generalists (like emacs and vim) which are borderline operating systems unto themselves, and thus it is also able to compete with many specialists because it can be tailored so effectively.

[TonyM]

I know this answer is less that complete, but TiddlyWiki has no competitor in my mind that can deliver on the suit of possibilities it can deliver, however only an elite group know this.

As raised before its competitors are any application or service that delivers a subset of what tiddlywiki can do, and since tiddlywiki can do a lot it has a lot of competitors, even if their solutions do not go as far.

I believe various tiddlywiki solutions need to be available to compete in many different fields.

Regards

Tony

[bimlas]

I came from the Vim era: it's a popular text editor, mostly used by technical people. I tried out different ways to store my thoughts, for example: plain text (Asciidoctor) files, Jekyll (blog platform), Boostnote (note taking software). Whenever I tried out new ways, these was my most important requirements:

• Offline first
  I don't want to depend on companies - when it's closing its doors, my notes are gone
• Export my notes easily
  If I ever want to change to another tool, I want to move my notes into that easily (at least with minimal modifications)
  
• The best would be to store as plain text
  I'm using Git heavily, thus I like to keep my "backups" in a repository - for this job the text format is the best
  
• Be able to read my notes from everywhere
  I would like to read my notes from any computer without installing the "editor" itself
• Be portable
  It has to work on Linux / Windows (Android is not reuired, but it's good if it works) - the best would be to use exactly the same GUI on every platform
• Require as few as possible external programs
  For example compiling Asciidoctor files to HTML require Asciidoctor itself, which is written in Ruby -> needs that too
• Tag feature
  My habit is that write a note and add a lot of related tags to it - I don't have to think where to put in the ToC, because I can find anything by tag intersections
  

Whenever I tried out new stuff, it turned out that it doesn't have some of these features, thus I switched back to old, but good plain text (Asciidoctor) format (because it's the most flexible) + Vim editor (syntax highlighting, search and replace, basic file navigation).

The problem with file based note taking is that

• You are forced to use hierarchy
  You have to place your files somewhere in the directory tree, but it's not clear that a note about "NoteTaking" should go in to "TextEditing", "Software", "Practice", because it belongs to all of these "categories"
• You can drop every note into one directory, but in this case looking for them is hard
  You can store the tags in the filename and use file searching, but if you want to share your notes with others, he/she will not know what to do
• Hard to search for tags and tag intersections
  With regular searching tools (like Grep) you cannot do fuzzy match, but you can search for regex, like "tags:.*Software.*TextEditing", the disadvantages of this is that you has to store the tags in predefined (maybe alphabetical) order
  You can use fuzzy file searchers (like FZF or Everything), but you cannot get the list of tags to pick from that
• Cannot include images and other media types into notes

So I continued searching for The Notetaking Software, then I found TiddlyWiki and fell in love with it, because it knows almost everything that I want, besides this it's incredibly hackable: you can turn it to any kind of software, not just notetaking (todo list, book, GTD, project documentation, family tree, photo gallery with categories and tags, etc.)!

[TonyM]

I wonder if we list all the things tw can possibly be used for, then we can find the Competition for each of those uses. Then we can compare tiddlywiki with that market. The problem is out of the box, tiddlywiki has all the potential to be more than the best, but out of the box the competitors playing as they do in a smaller playground must be better, at least until it cant do what you want.

There is an answer, but we must keep looking.

I will create a new tiddlywiki to help :)

Tony

[HansWobbe]

@bimlas:

Thank you for this post.  It's a comprehensive statement of why I too am a devoted TiddlyWiki fan.

Regards,

Hans

On Friday, October 19, 2018 at 2:55:25 AM UTC-4, bimlas wrote:

 

...

[Lost Admin]

I have two use cases for TiddlyWiki.

As an Internet accessible note-taking and information organizing tool. In this space the competition is OneNote and EverNote. I prefer TiddlyWiki because I can keep the notes on MY server and out of the hands of advertisers. Plus, no special software, so I can use my locked-down work laptop.

As a simple content management system. Think very small web-sites. These are too small for something like WordPress. Two specific examples:

• Home "intranet" single tiddlywiki that is mostly enhanced bookmarks. Tabs for "admin" that links to the admin interfaces on all the devices on my network (and service providers like ISP), "media" which links to my plex server, tablo (network PVR), and various services for things like online TV listings, netflix, etc.
• Work (static file on work laptop) that links to the tools I use commonly (which is just glorified bookmarks) and notes where I've copied internal content from a variety of different sources that are relevant to me. It also has a number of "journal" entries that are templates for the content of e-mails I send regularly so I can cut-and-paste the content. I guess the competition here would be MS Word, browser bookmarks, and trying to get approval for a personal SharePoint page.

[EDIT] : I should add that in my mind, TiddyWiki is not a solution (the way OneNote is); TiddlyWiki is a tool (or framework) which can be used to build a solution (more like WordPress).

On Thursday, October 18, 2018 at 11:27:38 AM UTC-4, @TiddlyTweeter wrote:

[Mohammad]

I use Tiddlywiki for presentation. In my case it replaces powerpoint like software in many ways. For lectures TW keeps both my course notes and slides and I cannot find a replacement (a single app). It is simple, portable, exports your slides and lectures into pdf, json and other formats

The weak sides of TW is 

• the missing user manual, developer manual. You have to find your solution on yourself ( and of course the help from people in this forum should be highly appreciated)
• going behind the simple formatting, list, tag , TOC,  ... you need to have some programming capabilities, if not there is no edition of TW to fit your requirements

- Mohammad

[Mark S.]

How do you export as PDF?

Thanks!

-- Mark

[BurningTreeC]

Yesterday I found an interesting project which is under development but already usable: https://getpolarized.io/ (see it on github: https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf)

It allows viewing pdfs and annotate them, but the interesting part for TiddlyWiki users: it can capture websites and you can annotate and print them. It's definitely something to keep an eye on

You can already give it a try, it works on windows, mac and linux: https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf/releases

all the best, BTC

[Mohammad]

Hello Mark,

I use the http://printriver.tiddlyspot.com/  (PrintRiver) by BTC to export to pdf.

Mohammad

[Mohammad]

BTC,

 Thank you for sharing!

-Mohammad

[@TiddlyTweeter]

h0p3, TonyM, bimlas, Lost Admin & Mohammad

Thanks! It was good to read such thoughtful posts. It gives me a much better idea!

Best wishes
Josiah