TiddlyStretch: stretchtext in TiddlyWiki

[Soren Bjornstad]

I've been playing with Ted Nelson's stretchtext idea lately. The gist is that you can expand and shrink text to a desired level of detail in place – so it's kind of a middle ground between linking and straight transclusion. In TW, I implement each fragment of stretchtext as a tiddler, where the description field contains a summary and the text field contains the full level of detail.

You can easily expand on this in a couple ways – you can change the fields used, or you can instead render the tiddler through a pair of arbitrary templates, one for the summary and one for the expanded version. You can create multi-level stretchtext by using more stretchtext macros within the first level of tiddlers. I also have a stretch-links macro that works like list-links, but instead of just linking to relevant tiddlers, it makes them expandable within the current tiddler.

Here's an example:

And a couple more examples in my Zettelkasten (permaview).

If this sounds interesting, check out the prototype TiddlyStretch plugin at https://sobjornstad.github.io/tiddlystretch/ and let me know what you think!

[Mohammad Rahmani]

Hi Soren!

A Very useful tool indeed!

• The link https://sobjornstad.github.io/tiddlystretch/ seems is not working so I drag and drop from your https://zettelkasten.sorenbjornstad.com/
• The $:/plugins/TheDiveO/FontAwesome seems is required

I tested on https://tiddlywiki.com/ and it works like a charm!

Having extra fields needs extra work. So as an option may be you could have a first paragraph as your smallField

Note your design is great, what I am proposing is an extra option. Tobias Beer preview tool uses such options.

Side note: I realized your Zettelkasten edition has more tools for note taking! great additions.

Best wishes

Mohammad

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[Mat]

One of my earlier plugins

http://stretchtext.tiddlyspot.com/

<:-)

[strikke...@gmail.com]

Thomas Elmiger created TextStretch named so, due to Mats former creation - and later Strex for the ease og use.

[David Gifford]

I added this to the Toolmap, next to the other two stretch texts plugins mentioned in this thread.

Comments:

1. I like this approach in that the stretch text is a separate tiddler, and the tiddler is easily accessed by the button, to edit it.

2. The magnifying glass with the plus and minus was a good icon choice.

3. To each his/her own re: choices, but if I were to do this, I would have only the magnifying glass visible, then when you click that, I would have all but the button to open the tiddler. Why? a) when reading, the less clutter and confusion, the better. b) when you open the stretch, if you already have the tiddler title link there, the other button to the view mode of the tiddler is redundant.

4. Are the bullets also redundant? The icons seem to function as the bullet, standing at the head of the text as they do. The bullets and text don't align anyway. You might think about creating a class for special lists where the bullet is removed entirely.

5. Thank you for your willingness to share your at times very personal TiddlyWiki. It is a goldmine of ideas, nicely organized. I now want to read through it!

6. How did you get the tag colors separated in your Explore tab > Tags tab??? I like that idea a lot. Makes it easy to narrow down the kinds of tabs and check them quickly.

[Soren Bjornstad]

Sorry about the broken link. I changed the casing of the name after publishing, and apparently GitHub Pages URLs are case-sensitive, but it kept the page available at the old casing for a little while while I checked to see if it was, so then I thought it was not case-sensitive and didn't think I needed to update it. Here's a new link: https://sobjornstad.github.io/TiddlyStretch/

Thanks for sharing the other implementations! The way I tend to use it, separate tiddlers is a much more useful layout, but I can see the benefit of embedding the text in arbitrary macros, too. Unfortunate that I named my macro the same as Mat's plugin – didn't know about that one before I started. Hopefully nobody will try to use both implementations together.

> Having extra fields needs extra work. So as an option may be you could have a first paragraph as your smallField

Ooh, I like this idea.

> 6. How did you get the tag colors separated in your Explore tab > Tags tab??? I like that idea a lot. Makes it easy to narrow down the kinds of tabs and check them quickly

Change $:/core/Filters/AllTags!!filter to [tags[]!is[system]sort[title]sort[color]] (sort[color] added).

> Are the bullets also redundant? The icons seem to function as the bullet, standing at the head of the text as they do. The bullets and text don't align anyway. You might think about creating a class for special lists where the bullet is removed entirely.

The main reason I put bullets in was because having them as separate paragraphs didn't look good in many cases; each “paragraph” was too small and there was too much space between them. But I agree there are cases where the bullet points don't really look great either. A better way might be to add a CSS class to the list generated by stretch-links that removes the bullet points and tweaks the spacintg (perhaps optionally). I'll play around with different options here. Sometimes the text really feels like a list, as in Laws of Cynicism, and the bullets might still be useful.

[Soren Bjornstad]

David, I just discovered what you mean by "the bullets and text don't align anyway" because I'm waiting to get a new battery installed in my car and working on my MacBook at the shop. On my Linux desktop where I usually edit wikis, they do line up! I guess there is some difference in the default system font. Some folks have reported similar inconsistencies between platforms with Grok TiddlyWiki (related to font weight, in that case), so perhaps I need to take a deep dive into this.

On Saturday, March 6, 2021 at 8:25:27 AM UTC-6 David Gifford wrote: