TiddlyWiki is my backbone infrastructure

March 10, 2024

I have been a regular TiddlyWiki user for several years now. I use both TiddlyWiki Classic and also regular TiddlyWiki. For the rest of the article I will use TW.

I’ve had the idea to write a post about TW, but being a user for so long I find it challenging to put myself in the perspective of a new user. To continue off my previous post, Too many notes“, TW is a solution for when you want to create a wiki, but you dont want to install MediaWiki. You have a folder full of plain text notes, but how do you organize them?

You do this by writing links and using tags and using filters and fields. At the end of the day it is all just plain text and if you decide you don’t like TW anymore, you can just export everything to plain text and start all over again.

Except TW isn’t just a folder full of notes. The entire wiki is written in JavaScript, HTML, and it’s own wikitext syntax. Each piece of the user interface is itself is written and can be edited in a tiddler, the individual unit of text within the wiki.

The other advantage of TW is it can save itself as a single HTML file. If you are in a situation where you cannot install any software on a computer, you can still save your TW to your download folder and email it to yourself. There is also a hosted option with TiddlyHost, a service where you can create a TW and save to it in the cloud or download a copy locally.

Using TW is similar to building with Lego. You could still use vanilla TW without changing any settings, but it is a flexible system you can rebuild to meet your own requirments. By becoming a user you adopt a certain “TiddlyWiki philosophy”, a rather loose term, but there is a rich and active community of users who are both developers and users where you can ask questions and get help.

I’m still not sure where I first heard about TiddlyWiki, but it goes all the way back when I read Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders and Lifehacker. I remember hearing about GTDTiddlyWiki and how it could print and make Hipster PDA notecards. Yet I did not use TW for GTD, but I remained aware of it. I did not begin using TW on a regular basis until September, 2010.

Whether or not you should use TW doesn’t seem so clear cut. Deciding what software to use for productivity purpose is a personal one. As 2024 is the 20th Anniversary of TW, the comments from this discussion on Github shows the impact the software has had on those who have and continue to use it.