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 Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

wiki A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

in the form of a single

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

file that includes CSS,

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

, 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 Quine may refer to: * Quine (computing), a program that produces its source code as output * Quine's paradox, in logic * Quine (surname), people with the surname ** Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000), American philosopher and logician See al ...

. The idea of producing a copy of its own source code 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 A high-level programming language is a programming language with strong Abstraction (computer science), abstraction from the details of the computer. In contrast to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language ''elements'', be ea ...

. As such, it can be used for a wide and knowledge domain-agnostic 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 by 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 Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

(allowing corporate IE lockdown to be bypassed), TiddlyWiki can be useful in corporate environments where

red tape Red tape is a concept employed to denounce excessive or redundant regulation and adherence to formal rules for creating unnecessary constraints on action and decision-making. The occurrence of red tape is usually associated with governments but a ...

or IT resources might prevent the use of a wiki that requires a more complicated installation. TiddlyWiki has been used as a

software framework In computer programming, a software framework is a software abstraction that provides generic functionality which developers can extend with custom code to create applications. It establishes a standard foundation for building and deploying soft ...

to build specialisations such as the following: * Socialtext used TiddlyWiki to add offline functionality.

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 that contains the source text and meta data in

wiki markup A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is Collaborative editing, collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edit ...

. 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 A mind map is a diagram used to visually organize information into a hierarchy, showing relationships among pieces of the whole. It is often based on a single concept, drawn as an image in the center of a blank page, to which associated represe ...

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 in ...

, 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 created Markdown in 2004 as an easy-to-read markup language. Markdown is widely used for blogging and instant messaging, and also used ...

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

WebDav WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which allows user agents to collaboratively author contents ''directly'' in an HTTP web server by providing facilities for conc ...

enabled

Web_server A web server is computer software and underlying Computer hardware, hardware that accepts requests via Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, co ...

saving works out-off-the-box * 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 W ...

FileSystemObject for

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated as IE or MSIE) is a deprecation, retired series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were u ...

* TiddlySaver

Java applet Java applets were applet, small applications written in the Java (programming language), Java programming language, or another programming language that Compiled language, compiles to Java bytecode, and delivered to users in the form of Ja ...

to extend

Safari A safari (; originally ) is an overland journey to observe wildlife, wild animals, especially in East Africa. The so-called big five game, "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, African leopard, leopard, rhinoceros, African elephant, elep ...

Opera Opera is a form of History of theatre#European theatre, Western theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by Singing, singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically ...

, 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 curr ...

browser: ** Mozilla File I/O under the control of the UniversalXPConnect per-file preferences. That functionality was later 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 (formerly British Telecom) is a British Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered in London, England. It has operations in around 180 countries and is the largest provider of fixed-li ...

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 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 was formally renamed to "TiddlyWiki Classic".

License

TiddlyWiki is

free and open source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

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), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or so ...

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