I’m starting to love the process of journaling and note-taking on TiddlyWiki. Being able to weave my ideas, notes, and experiences together easily has been a bit of a game-changer for me. Who knew that a wiki would be so useful in my day-to-day life? The downside of using TiddlyWiki is that it’s not exactly what I wanted out of the box. I had to put in some effort and tinker to get it to work well for me because it felt like it was missing some of the features that I needed. Here are the plugins and tools that I’m currently using that make TiddlyWiki more of a joy to use:

1. Stroll. As I mentioned in “Hello, TiddlyWiki,” the cool thing about Stroll is that it adds bi-directional links to my documents. It means that if I make a “Nintendo” link in a document called “Animal Crossing,” “Animal Crossing” will end up creating a link back to “Nintendo,” too. This lets me see all the relationships between my documents. For example, it can tell me when I played Animal Crossing and the people that I played with on that day.

2. TiddlyDesktop. TiddlyWiki is a single HTML file that somehow has everything it needs inside of it. I’m not just talking about the JS and CSS—it has all my documents and images inside of it, too. There’s no database, there’s no server, and there’s no use of browser storage either. Each document that you make ends up being a part of the HTML itself. It’s a crazy yet brilliant way of creating a self-contained program. It pulls this off by being a quine. This means that TiddlyWiki’s source code and data can be viewed and modified within TiddlyWiki itself. However, the downside of being an HTML file is that you can’t write to the local filesystem directly. People have created different solutions for getting around this, but I think my favorite is TiddlyDesktop. It’s a specialized browser that makes saving wikis less awkward and more natural for people.

3. Whitespace Theme. The default theme that comes with TiddlyWiki is a bit too spartan for me, so finding a nicer coat of paint on an app that I use all day makes a difference. You can find a few more themes here.

4. Favorites. I have documents that I frequently go back to, and the Favorites plugin is perfect for pinning them on the side.

5. Project Manager. I’ve been using TiddlyWiki to track my article reading list, book reading list, and some of the ideas that I have for my blog, and the Project Manager plugin has been perfect for that.

I’m still learning as I go, but I’m pretty content with my current setup. The only thing that I’m anxious about is performance: since everything is in a single HTML file, are things going to get slower in a few months or years? In this video, the creator says that 100MB wikis are still fast, but I’m curious about the limits of large web apps. I guess we’ll find out!