TiddlyWiki in 2025

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Posted by Dee
Jan 29, 2025 at 07:09 PM

TiddlyWiki has been seeing some new activity recently, as can be seen here:

https://tiddlywiki.substack.com/archive

I’ve been interested in TW off & on over the years, but never committed to it.

I’m considering giving it a serious try now, after discovering an excellent learning resource called “Grok TiddlyWiki” by Soren Bjornstad:

https://groktiddlywiki.com

I am especially intrigued by his article “Why TiddlyWiki?”, which I think raises many excellent points about choosing a system for note taking and information management:

https://groktiddlywiki.com/read/#Why TiddlyWiki?

I would be interested to hear from others who use TW (or have in the past), and your thoughts on the article.

Dee

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jan 30, 2025 at 01:21 PM

TiddlyWiki has intrigued me for a long time. I tried to use it a dozen or more years ago. After getting part way through Soren’s video I had to admit to myself that if I want to be that involved with designing my PKM, I could also use Notion or Obsidian or Tana or a number of other options. Don’t take that as a knock on TiddlyWiki or the other apps. It’s a comment on where I’m at now. Still it is fun to look at Soren’s resources. Thank you.

Steve

Dee wrote:
TiddlyWiki has been seeing some new activity recently, as can be seen
>here:
> >https://tiddlywiki.substack.com/archive
> >I’ve been interested in TW off & on over the years, but never committed
>to it.
> >I’m considering giving it a serious try now, after discovering an
>excellent learning resource called “Grok TiddlyWiki” by Soren Bjornstad:
> >https://groktiddlywiki.com
> >I am especially intrigued by his article “Why TiddlyWiki?”, which I
>think raises many excellent points about choosing a system for note
>taking and information management:
> >https://groktiddlywiki.com/read/#Why TiddlyWiki?
> >I would be interested to hear from others who use TW (or have in the
>past), and your thoughts on the article.
> >Dee

Posted by Dee
Jan 30, 2025 at 03:38 PM

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your reply. :)

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
> After getting part way through Soren’s video I had to admit to myself that if I want to be that involved
> with designing my PKM, I could also use Notion or Obsidian or Tana or a number of other options.

I’ve been CRIMPing for decades, and feel like I’ve tried almost everything (on Windows).

I **wish** it were possible to find a simple app that can do everything I want, but I ask a lot … So alas, I just keep going back to my trusty text editor!! :o

I do really like that TiddlyWiki is free and open source, and can be used locally.

Here are some other things that compelled me from Soren’s “Why TiddlyWiki?” article:

- “TiddlyWiki offers an entirely new way of thinking … the benefits often appear underwhelming to those who haven’t experienced it (see Tools for Thinking Don’t Wow: https://mosmu.se/#ToolsForThinkingDontWow:ToolsForThinkingDontWow ).”

Note: That linked article is also well worth reading.

- “you break ideas out into small, reusable pieces called tiddlers, and relate them and further describe their properties using links, tags, and fields. You can query based on all these properties and more using filters, and weave tiddlers together into other tiddlers to create aggregations and summaries using transclusion.”

- “Wikitext is mostly a formatting language, but it’s also a declarative language for finding and making changes to notes.”

- “TiddlyWiki is written and customized using TiddlyWiki: both the content in your wiki and the wiki software itself are written in wikitext. This means that changes to your content seamlessly blend into changes to the software. … This ability to evolve your content and your tools simultaneously, in the same place, using the same language, is efficient, empowering, and mind-expanding in a way that’s difficult to explain until you try it.”

That all sounds great “on paper”, but I haven’t actually used TiddlyWiki yet. And yes, it does sound like it involves effort. But if he’s right, the effort pays off.

Maybe, as he suggests in his “Tools for Thinking Don’t Wow” article, it will take a while of really committing to TiddlyWiki before its full benefits become apparent.

Fingers crossed!

> Still it is fun to look at Soren’s resources. Thank you.

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