Standard tiddler edit dialogue box on TiddlyWiki 5

TiddlyWiki is a personal wiki and a non-linear notebook for organising and sharing complex information. It is an open-source single page application

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pub ...

in the form of a single

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...

file that includes CSS,

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

, embedded files such as images, and the text content. It is designed to be easy to customize and re-shape depending on application. It facilitates re-use of content by dividing it into small pieces called ''Tiddlers''. TiddlyWiki is an unusual example of a practical quine. This idea of producing a copy of its own source code that lies at the heart of TiddlyWiki's ability to independently save changes to itself. ''Quine'' is also the name of the unofficial TiddlyWiki application for iPhone/iPad.

Applications

TiddlyWiki is designed for customization and to be shaped according to users' specific needs, perhaps comparable to a

high-level programming language In computer science, a high-level programming language is a programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer. In contrast to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language ''elements'', be easier to us ...

. As such, it can be shaped into a wide and arbitrary range of special applications. Examples include niche

note-taking Note-taking (sometimes written as notetaking or note taking) is the practice of recording information from different sources and platforms. By taking notes, the writer records the essence of the information, freeing their mind from having to reca ...

applications, to-do lists, presentations, collections, authoring tools, personal databases, recipe collections, etc. Although there are many TiddlyWiki documents on the Web, the majority of TiddlyWikis reside on personal computers or in the cloud, or are exchanged over email, in a manner similar to word processing documents and spreadsheets. As a single HTML file, or saved as an HTA file in Microsoft

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

(allowing corporate IE lockdown to be bypassed), TiddlyWiki can be useful in corporate environments where red tape or IT resources might prevent the use of a wiki that requires a more complicated installation. TiddlyWiki has been used as a software framework to build specialisations. For example ...
Interactive Historical Atlas of the Disciplines
is an Interactive Historical Atlas of the (Knowledge) Disciplines *

SocialText Socialtext Incorporated was a company based in Palo Alto, California, that produced enterprise social software for companies. It offered an integrated suite of wiki tools and social software applications, including microblogging, user profiles, ...

uses TiddlyWiki as a part of their unplugged feature.

Tiddlers

TiddlyWiki introduces the division of content into its "smallest, semantically meaningful, components", referred to as ''tiddlers''. Each tiddler is stored inside an HTML

division Division or divider may refer to: Mathematics *Division (mathematics), the inverse of multiplication *Division algorithm, a method for computing the result of mathematical division Military *Division (military), a formation typically consisting ...

that contains the source text and

meta data Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

wiki markup A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication Collaborative editing, collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be ...

. The purpose with this division is to enable easy re-use of content for different narratives and in different contexts. For example, this section ("Tiddlers") could be a tiddler. In the TiddlyWiki user interface it would appear as it appears here but as a separate "note" visually distinct from other tiddlers. The underlying HTML source code (which is not typically directly viewed or modified by end users) would be something like:

TiddlyWiki introduces the division of... This same "tiddler" could then be reused in other contexts in the wiki.

Plugins

In addition to containing text, a tiddler can be a plugin with additional JavaScript and CSS to extend TiddlyWiki. As a result, TiddlyWiki is used in a wide variety of adaptations and uses beyond that of a personal wiki. Popular community plugins include interactive graph visualization or

mind maps The mind is the set of faculties responsible for all mental phenomena. Often the term is also identified with the phenomena themselves. These faculties include thought, imagination, memory, will, and sensation. They are responsible for various m ...

with TiddlyMap, project management with Projectify, integration with the spaced-repetition-flashcards tool Anki with TiddlyRemember, mathematical typesetting based on KaTeX or

MathJax MathJax is a cross-browser JavaScript library that displays mathematical notation in web browsers, using MathML, LaTeX and ASCIIMathML markup. MathJax is released as open-source software under the Apache License. The MathJax project started i ...

, adding a Disqus-based comment system, and enabling standard

Markdown Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is appealing to human readers in its source code form. Markdown i ...

markup.

File saving

TiddlyWiki may be saved as a single html file containing both the data (tiddlers) and the application (wiki), or the data can be saved on a per tiddler basis in text files (via extensions). A TiddlyWiki opened from a

file URI The file URI Scheme is a URI scheme defined in , typically used to retrieve files from within one's own computer. Previously the file URI scheme was specified in and . The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published RFC 8089, updating the ...

may save changes made back to the original file using one of the following techniques: * the Microsoft

ActiveX ActiveX is a deprecated software framework created by Microsoft that adapts its earlier Component Object Model (COM) and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technologies for content downloaded from a network, particularly from the World Wide We ...

FileSystemObject for

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Windows line of operating systems ( ...

* TiddlySaver

Java applet Java applets were small applications written in the Java programming language, or another programming language that compiles to Java bytecode, and delivered to users in the form of Java bytecode. The user launched the Java applet from a ...

to extend Safari,

Opera Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a libr ...

, Chrome/Chromium, and other browsers. Requires the Java runtime. * Two techniques were developed for the

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current ...

browser: ** Mozilla File I/O under the control of the UniversalXPConnect per-file preferences. That functionality was removed from Firefox. ** Th
TiddlyFox add-on for Firefox
uses the Firefox SDK's simple-storage API. The add-on stopped working with Firefox around version 57 in 2017 which does not support the API.

History

* The first version of TiddlyWiki was released by Jeremy Ruston in September 2004. *

BT Group BT Group plc ( trading as BT and formerly British Telecom) is a British multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered in London, England. It has operations in around 180 countries and is the largest provider of fixed-line, bro ...

bought Osmosoft in 2007 appointing Ruston as BT's "Head of Open Source Innovation". * TiddlyWiki was selected as one of the Top 100 Tools for 2007 and 2008 by the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies. * In November 2011,

Jeremy Ruston TiddlyWiki is a personal wiki and a non-linear notebook for organising and sharing complex information. It is an open-source single page application wiki in the form of a single HTML file that includes CSS, JavaScript, embedded files such as im ...

announced his departure from Osmosoft and commitment to continue development on TiddlyWiki. * In December 2013 TiddlyWiki5 was released. It is a total rebuild of the original TiddlyWiki, based on HTML5 and with many significant improvements from lessons learnt over the years with the original TiddlyWiki. The original TiddlyWiki has come to be called TiddlyWiki Classic.

License

TiddlyWiki is

free and open source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

and is distributed under the terms of the BSD-3-Clause license. The copyright of TiddlyWiki is held in trust by UnaMesa, a

non-profit organization A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

Community

There is an active usr community that quite helpful to all levels of users at https://tiddlywiki.com/#Community

References

External links

* {{Notetaking software Free note-taking software Note-taking software Free wiki software Personal wikis Portable software 2004 software Cross-platform free software Free software programmed in JavaScript Software using the BSD license