TiddlyWiki: An Open Source Alternative to Notion or Obsidian
cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16316509
TiddlyWiki is a “non-linear personal web notebook,” as well as an exemplar project in the open source community. It can be a note-taking or information-ordering system in a similar vein to Obsidian or Notion, although TiddlyWiki was launched back in 2004. It can also be thought of as producing a wiki with interactive components.
However, as I discovered to my cost, TiddlyWiki has never had a strong “start here,” because it is not tailored to one specific task. Obsidian, by comparison, has the advantage of a clear vision of what it does. TiddlyWiki bewilders you with options at first because it hasn’t been designed to be sold. The community focus is on adapting it to different use cases.
So I’m going to take the advice in this explainer and use TiddlyDesktop while mentioning that there are plenty of other arrangements. It is, after all, just HTML and JavaScript. Let’s get started…
Oh wow, TiddlyWiki, what a blast from the past
TiddlyWiki sounds like something else entirely
I've used it several times since it was launched and it's always the saving that is a bit awkward. It is a great tool though. I'm using obsidian now purely for it's simplicity
I never even managed to make it work, I remember it needed some kind of plugin for saving. That sucks pretty bad, and if I'm gonna host I'd use something else entirely. Maybe it works better now?
If you run the Node.js version, that's all handled for you. It's only if you want to do the party trick of keeping it all in a single HTML file that you need to worry about a plugin or anything like that. And even then, the server version exports to a standalone HTML file with one or two clicks.
Edit to add: it's the only substantial Node package I've ever seen with zero dependencies. Very lightweight and simple to run.
Ooh, neato! I'll have to give it a go sometime.
Anyone have any comparisons to Logseq? I've seen Logseq and Obsidian compared fairly directly, but I don't remember seeing TiddlyWiki come up in comparisons in that arena when I was looking at it.
I know TiddlyWiki quite well but have only poked at Logseq, so maybe it's more similar to this than I think, but TiddlyWiki is almost entirely implemented in itself. There's a very small core that's JavaScript but most of it is implemented as wiki objects (they call them "tiddlers," yes, really) and almost everything you interact with can be tweaked, overridden, or imitated. There's almost nothing that "the system" can do but you can't. It's idiosyncratic, kind of its own little universe to be learned and concepts to be understood, but if you do it's insanely flexible.
Dig deep enough, and you'll discover that it's not a weird little wiki — it's a tiny, self-contained object database and web frontend framework that they have used to make a weird little wiki, but you can use it for pretty much anything else you want, either on top of the wiki or tearing it down to build your own thing. I've used it to make a prediction tracker for a podcast I follow, I've made my own todo list app in it, and I made a Super Bowl prop bet game for friends to play that used to be spreadsheet-based. For me, it's the perfect "I just want to knock something together as a simple web app" tool.
And it has the fun party trick (this used to be the whole point of it but I'd argue it has moved beyond this now) that your entire wiki can be exported to a single HTML file that contains the entire fully functional app, even allowing people to make their own edits and save a new copy of the HTML file with new contents. If running a small web server isn't an issue, that's the easiest way to do it because saving is automatic and everything is centralized, otherwise you need to jump through some hoops to get your web browser to allow writing to the HTML file on disk or just save new copies every time.