I continue to be fascinated by the world of TiddlyWiki, and have been trying
to scratch an itch in my mind by learning more about it.
One of the deeper aspects of TiddlyWiki, called out by its creator
Jeremy Ruston (https://jermolene.com/), is that TiddlyWiki can be leveraged
by non-software-developers to craft ad-hoc, well-tailored informational
“apps”. This is very similar to how non-software-developers have used
Microsoft Excel’s spreadsheet-scripting to do likewise in business,
crafting custom programs to meet a need, without paying for software developers
to get into the mix.
And this is bolstered by how TiddlyWiki is entirely self contained
(see Playing with TiddlyWiki).
Here are just a couple of the cooler apps I’ve learned have been built
in TiddlyWiki.
mGSD
Some people might be familiar with Project Management or Personal Productivity
apps like (non-exhaustive list)
Todoist,
Things,
OmniFocus,
and so on. These apps are probably all great and worth the money.
I’m not going to say that TiddlyWiki is better than those dedicated apps…
But what’s cool is that, as far back as the 2000’s, the original version
of TiddlyWiki (“TiddlyWiki Classic”) had a plugin/distribution that was
basically the same as those tools: “mGSD” (formerly “Monkey Getting Things Done”).
The website appears to be down,
but thanks to the magic of Wayback Machine
and of TiddlyWiki programs being self-contained HTML files,
you can still view and even download fully-functioning copies of mGSD from
back in the day:
GSD5
Someone wrote a port of mGSD for the newer version of TiddlyWiki (“TiddlyWiki5”), but from what I’ve read, it doesn’t have quite as many features as mGSD.
“Digital Gardens”
In You and your mind garden,
neuroscientist Ann-Laure Le Cunff describes a “mind garden”:
A mind garden is… [about planting] new ideas…
by consistently taking notes, and combining them together…
Sometimes, two seemingly remote or even incompatible ideas
will give birth to a new insight.
She goes on to argue that digital tools like TiddlyWiki
make the best mind gardens.
Notes jotted down with paper and pencil,
are easy to remember but painstaking to edit and recompose.
Notes dotted down in an appropriate digital tool, like TiddlyWiki,
may not be easier to remember; instead, they are trivial to
search, edit, and recompose.
You can read Le Cunff’s article How to build a digital garden with TiddlyWiki to learn more,
and you can watch “TiddlyWiki Hangout #106” to learn more about her process:
Dungeons and Dragons Game-Manual
I “TiddlyWiki Hangout #107”, two Dungeons and Dragons game-masters
describe how they built custom programs for
describing an ever-growing universe of Dungeons and Dragons adventures.
Not only that, they also have sub-routines for
“character-generators”, to quickly create new adventures and characters
on-the-fly during games.
(This video is a bit long, but you can watch 5-10 minutes to get the idea.)
C Compilers
This one is more of a cool hack than an actual productivity tool, but
for me it really captures the essence of TiddlyWiki
(Editor’s note: the original Twitter account was deleted so here’s a screenshot instead):
