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TiddlyWiki resurgent
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Posted by Prion
Oct 19, 2017 at 01:46 PM
Please, no apology needed. In fact, I was wondering what this thread was about as I am currently traveling without much access to the internet, hence each page load is excruciatingly slowly and I had not read all the posts again before replying.
I really tried to love Tiddlywiki v5 but could not get past the point that it is an island by itself.
I was really looking for a repository for general notes that sometimes need to be found e.g. by a system-wide search without deciding first where to search. Do you have much experience with Tiddlywiki desktop? Still not ideal but perhaps workable?
Posted by MadaboutDana
Oct 23, 2017 at 08:29 AM
Hm, I fear a system-wide search wouldn’t be helpful with TiddlyWiki, because despite the fact that each tiddler *appears* to be a separate note, they’re actually all written into the single (enormous, ca. 2 MB in a modest setup) HTML file that is TiddlyWiki.
For something like you’re describing, you’d be better off with Alfons’s Notebooks, which handles all notes as separate files, or maybe one of the many excellent cross-platform Markdown editors. Notebooks is very capable, and a new version is due out in the “not too distant” future (hopefully ramping up its capabilities in line with the very good iOS version).
I’m currently experimenting with Chronos’s latest, Notelife. Nice app, but I can’t work out how it handles its files. It uses iCloud for syncing, but keeps everything hidden and notes don’t show up in a general (Spotlight) search.
Cheers,
Bill
Posted by MadaboutDana
Oct 23, 2017 at 11:06 AM
Interestingly, Ulysses also produces separate files which are included in Spotlight searches.
Posted by Paul Korm
Oct 24, 2017 at 09:21 AM
Modern applications on macOS can store documents in various places. AppStore apps are sandboxed and usually store documents in ~/Library/Containers/... Other applications will store documents in .plists or SQL databases in other locations such as in ~/Library/Application Support/... or in very-obscurely named folders elsewhere in your personal Library. iCloud documents are stored in ~/Library/Mobile Documents/... In the last, what you see in Finder is not, actually, the path where the iCloud documents are actually stored—Finder spoofs the “real” path in its display.
IOW—it’s frequently very difficult to find “documents” for an app—and once you do, what are you going to do with a collection of .plists or SQL data files? With regard to Spotlight, it depends on whether the application bothers to create Spotlight index metadata files. Many applications ignore Spotlight—perhaps Notefile does?
Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 29, 2017 at 11:56 AM
Dr Andus wrote:
>Speaking of wikis, does anyone here use an online wiki as a private wiki
>for a personal notes database?
Thanks for all the suggestions.
Paul Korm wrote:
>DocuWiki is simple and has all the core features I think a wiki needs to
>have.
Yeah, DocuWiki seems the closest to CT as a wiki (reasonably similar syntax, the look of the thing). But it seems it would be very labour-intensive to transfer thousands of CT topics and get the syntax aligned through some regex wizardry (a skill I don’t have).
I’d also be a bit worried about just relying on some 3rd party hosting. I’d definitely need some kind of a daily automatic backup. Again, sounds like quite a bit of time and effort needed to set it up. (I’d need to research all this, and learn how to do it.)
MadaboutDana wrote:
>Fourthly, Notion, which
>is really quite nice and developing into quite a promising universal
>wiki thingy (notion.io).
From the other suggestions, Notion looked the most interesting to me (the cleanest interface). But I’d need to look further into how easy it is to import thousands of CT topics, and what the options are for daily backups.
I guess my biggest problem is that so much work would be involved in transferring and altering the data and learning about the new solution and the backup that I would have to be absolutely sure that I’ve found the perfect online replacement for CT and that the time and effort spent on doing this would be worthwhile and that the alternative would work for at least five years or so (which is how long I’ve been using CT), before I’d need to move the data again.
Even researching this thing is time-consuming… I guess I’m experiencing being locked-up into Windows and CT. Maybe the solution I’m looking for hasn’t been invented yet. Ideally I’d just like to be able to export my CT topics as a single file and upload it to somewhere, and then do a few search-and-replace to fix any syntax differences. After that it would be all about some kind of a browser extension that would allow me to add copied text as a new entry into this online solution, so that I can annotate it later.
I guess Evernote, Onenote, and Keep offer those kinds of tools, but none of those services are close enough to what I’m looking for.