Sunday, March 04, 2007
First impressions of TiddlyWiki
I was initially very impressed with TiddlyWiki, but the more I play around with it, and think on how it works, the less inclined I am to actually use it.
I have a directory on my home computer called writings, which contains a ton of files related to writing. Ideas, notes and several attempts at novels (mostly attempted during National Novel Writing Month) litter the directory, making about 16 megabytes of stuff just sitting there, waiting for me to do something with it all (hmmm … a recipes file—interesting).
Sixteen megabytes. That's a large amount of text to store in a single file (aside from the issue of actually getting it all into any type of Wiki to begin with), much less work with a file that large. I did, however, import (using cut-n-paste) one of the files, ideas into TiddlyWiki to get an idea of what it would be like.
I'm resistant. I find it just as easy to use simple text files as it is to use TiddlyWiki, but with the text files, I can use any computer with Internet access and an ssh client. With TiddlyWiki, I would have to copy the file to whereever I am and afterwards, make sure to copy it back to my home computer (and yes, that is an issue with me).
There's also the sad fact that the base TiddlyWiki is over 220,000 bytes of JavaScript code and requires a 28MB “helper app” to execute whereas the editor I use is about 174,000 bytes, has more features (like the editing keys I have on my keyboard actually usable for their intended purposes), and doesn't require a multimegabyte “helper app” to execute (unless you count the operating system as a “helper app”).
I'm still looking for the perfect editing system.
