Why every programmer should have a Tiddlywiki

Another vote for .txt files.<p>Easy to source-control and merge, easy to find stuff.<p>I can't help but think that someone, somewhere has a bloated XML-based API for doing this, probably requiring a server running a couple hundred megabytes worth of Java-based back-end. I'm old fashioned.<p>I don't anticipate a vanilla text file going out of fashion any time in the next hundred years or so.

Hi, I'm a developer on TiddlyWiki.<p>I'm not sure if this is the done thing or not (I'm relatively new to posting on Hacker News so apologies if not) but if anyone wants an online version of TiddlyWiki (that handles revisions, multiple users, has a RESTful API, etc), then we're currently working on a service called TiddlySpace (<a href="http://tiddlyspace.com" rel="nofollow">http://tiddlyspace.com</a>), which is basically an extensible online note taking app based on TiddlyWiki. It's on GitHub too.

These periodically recurring organization threads always motivate me to take another stab at adopting some kind of coherent approach to organizing my ideas.<p>Then I get depressed at how poorly thought out almost all the options are. I then become convinced that the only system that has been fairly well thought out is org-mode.<p>Then I fire up my emacs and the incredible frustrations and overwhelming disgust start to rise like a slow flood.<p>I load up my .org file and it's not wrapped. I can't read it. So I try to change the options. There are 5 incomprehensible word wrap options and none of them work. Then when I re-load my .org file, it hasn't saved the word wrapping setting.<p>I can't remember if it's shift-tab, alt-tab, command-shift.... one of them puts a TODO, another puts a new star, now suddenly I've reordered half of my lists...<p>Meanwhile, once I move a paragraph, emacs displays some kind of fragments of the characters in the previous location... what the hell is this?<p>I decide that I'd like to collaborate on a project -- org-mode seems like a great tool. But wait, I forgot that my collaborator is actually a NORMAL person. What is the chance that they will read the org-mode manual? Oh that's right, I'll just send them to the IRC channel.<p>Where was the calendar again?<p>I am literally in tears now. tears. This is the best personal organization software we have. It's 2011. Orgmode looks like my father's 1985 IBM terminal. Why do we always have to wait for Apple to inject a miniscule amount of actual DESIGN into software?<p>Please help me...

Used to use a wiki (MediaWiki) to track source material for a book with another collaborator. Worked mostly fine, except for when the DB crashed. I remember that it was hard to extract data out of it.<p>Mainly I've kept most of my programming notes, records, todos, research and so on in flat text files. They are easy to view, edit, backup, exchange, copy from, and version. For my use cases, I find it a more appealing technical solution to a wiki, which requires infrastructure to back it.<p>If someone could come up with a git/wiki hybrid, that would be interesting.

For personal notes I like Notational Velocity (<a href="http://notational.net/" rel="nofollow">http://notational.net/</a>), saved as plain text files in my DropBox, and linked with SimpleNote (<a href="http://simplenoteapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://simplenoteapp.com/</a>) for iPhone syncing.

For a number of years I used the single file Python wiki pwyky (<a href="http://infomesh.net/pwyky/" rel="nofollow">http://infomesh.net/pwyky/</a>) running on a server to serve as a personal lab notebook.<p>I added general project notes, links to relevant resources and a chronological log of projects.<p>The biggest benefits for me were:<p><pre><code> * keep track of multiple projects; * reduce overhead of switching between projects. </code></pre> There was, however, also a benefit for the wider community as well, because all of the pages were public--even the in-progress projects--people could make use of the knowledge I'd found so far, even if the project itself wasn't (ever :)) entirely documented.<p>When the server hosting my wiki, err, disappeared, I decided to create a service that would provide me the benefits I'd found and also make them available to other developers.<p>Labradoc is the result:<p><pre><code> * http://www.labradoc.com/ </code></pre> With Labradoc you can:<p><pre><code> * make general project notes with Markdown formatting; * keep a chronological log of project progress. </code></pre> I posted a Show HN a couple of months ago: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2669425" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2669425</a><p>Here's my own project list:<p><pre><code> * http://www.labradoc.com/i/follower </code></pre> If you don't already keep a project log I encourage you to do so.<p>If you already keep a project log I encourage you to make more of it public (it's okay, the people that judge you badly for in-progress hacks you don't want to work with anyway :) ).<p>In either case, try out Labradoc and see how it suits your workflow.

I find Evernote/Simplenote more effective for brain dumps. Evernote is especially useful for storing diagrams and photos of whiteboard diagrams.

I'm a big fan of using Notational Velocity for just these same reasons - <a href="http://notational.net/" rel="nofollow">http://notational.net/</a>

I'm hoping Asana largely solves these problems. I've been using it for about a week, just for personal projects and my work tasks, and it works wonderfully.<p>I can put links in comments and descriptions and easily reference them later, in a really usable way.

I worked for a year at a company and training two people to do my job from a stack of my personal notebooks and insider knowledge was a nightmare. After that I decided to keep a personal wiki which was easily searchable. Having gone the .txt route in the past and found it wanting, I decided on the next best thing and went with a Tiddlywiki.<p>I document all processes I develop and additionally keep a journal every day, and one at a project level. It has more than once saved my butt working on multiple projects and has made me a better manager. I finally graduated from a Tiddlywiki as I ended up wanting to collaborate on entries far too often. A year into my wiki experiment I switched to MediaWiki and haven't looked back as I can simply add collaborators and more transparently keep track of contributions.<p>For others wanting to transition I made a little conversion script here: <a href="http://www.itp.uzh.ch/~corbett/projects/code/tiddlywiki_to_mediawiki.py" rel="nofollow">http://www.itp.uzh.ch/~corbett/projects/code/tiddlywiki_to_m...</a><p>Tl;dr Keeping a wiki as a developer: ~best decision ever.

I write my notes in markdown and keep them in a git repository. A simple hook generates a collection of html documents that I host on my private server for reading while commuting.

I spent a day a couple of years ago writing an app to solve this kind of problem, and more. File format is plain text files stored in directories. Every directory becomes a tab; every file becomes an entry, with the first line in every file being its title. Along with plain text files, .log files are kept; these keep a log of every edit to the .txt file.<p>Nothing is ever deleted. No edits are ever lost; the whole undo stack is always there, and if you undo to a particular point and edit it, it just becomes a new revision on top of the old undo stack. There is no save / load - the app uses the directory it was started from, and saves when no edits have occurred for 5 seconds.<p>It's a combination of notepad, brainstorming log, todo list, and general notes. I keep it in sync across multiple machines with dropbox.

I would like to recommend this freeware lightweight structured text file editor. Definite upgrade over plain .txt files yet still extremely simple in every way. No browser/3rd party tool involvement needed. Its file format is human readable for the most part.<p>It supports all kinds of links in text: local, network files, internal pages (for wiki emulation). You can drag and drop links from web browser too.<p><a href="http://www.horstmuc.de/wmem.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.horstmuc.de/wmem.htm</a><p>I never stopped using this program since I found it several years ago.

I've been using google docs for these kinds of notes, searchable, shareable and accessible anywhere I can get to gmail.<p>I may consider dropbox + txt files, but gdocs is working fine so far.

I use Soywiki: <a href="http://danielchoi.com/software/soywiki.html" rel="nofollow">http://danielchoi.com/software/soywiki.html</a><p>Toss something like this in your .bashrc or .zshrc to run it in MacVim and have an easy command:<p><pre><code> export SOYWIKI_VIM=mvim alias wiki='cd ~/wiki; soywiki' </code></pre> Then just git init and push it up to a private GitHub repo, and you can check it and edit it on the go through the GitHub site.

I find Tiddlywiki extremely cumbersome and awkward.<p>Instead, I use Simplenote; Flick Note on my Android device, Resophnotes and SyncPad for Chrome on my PC.

I've since moved on to plain text files, but at my last job, when I left, I just had to delete a few more sensitive notes before passing my TiddyWiki file to my replacement and he had all my notes for the job. It was a technical sales role. I'd argue that a personal wiki is even more important for many other vocations than for programmers.

My favorite use of TiddlyWiki was making it the index.html in my home/public_html directory on our internal company server.<p>I had network write access via network mount on my laptop and whoever else who just wanted to browse my notes could goto <a href="http://internalcompanyserver/~myname/" rel="nofollow">http://internalcompanyserver/~myname/</a>

Personally use github's gollum: <a href="https://github.com/github/gollum" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/github/gollum</a> which is pretty awesome and git-backed.<p>Allows you to do all your wiki pages in markdown and a sleugh of other markup formats. Plus, did I mention git backed?!

I use Zim Desktop Wiki - more reliable than Tiddlywiki, no need for a browser, version control

OneNote (part of Office since, I think, 2007) is actually great for keeping structured notes on meetings, projects, etc. I know a lot of programmers don't run Windows, but if you're not fazed by letting Microsoft handle the details (i.e. your stuff gets put on SkyDrive under a Live account), it's not a bad way to go. I set it up on my work machine after I'd been running it on my home computer for a while, and I was pleasantly surprised at how easily it loaded the notes I've had from past projects.<p>Disclosure: Microsoft intern (in a completely different division, and I've been using it for longer than I've been here). My opinions are mine. :)

I wrote a personal wiki for Linux called Tomboy.<p>I've been working on Hackpad.com lately. It's a realtime wiki based on Etherpad. Pads are private by default, and you can invite people to edit them later.<p>I think it's better than tiddlywiki. Why not try it out?

Yesterday I started a comment asking if I'm the only programmer that doesn't keep many notes. I actually don't keep that many, relying on my memory and falling back to code comments, revision history, and email when that fails.<p>But then as I read through more comments, I realized that I've tried almost every one of these note systems - Tiddlywiki, TODO.txt, Evernote, Springpad, OneNote, Moleskine notebooks and others - but have never stuck with any of them. The only system that's ever stuck for me is email. I keep trying to get better at recapping meetings and decisions in email so I can find them later.

I have a collection of scripts, dotfiles, text note files, flat text data files, and ad hoc lightweight textual databases already to do this sort of thing. Doesn't require any special software, doesn't require a hosting server or active network connection, and yet I can edit, search, compress, refactor, version, backup and synch this data anyhow I want, anytime, essentially for free, and with an absolute minimum of moving parts. And using the same set of CLI tools I already must or at least should know anyway for my profession.

I use MediaWiki now, I love it. It's free, and has really helped my organization. I use it for everything - passwords, API keys, links, random code snippets, etc. It's better than a text file to me, because both the structure and formatting ability encourages properly organizing data.<p>Though, it's most important to just have SOME well-greased system, no matter what the platform. If it's a text file that does it for you, great. If you spend 10 minutes trying to find a password - time to get a system.

I use fossil (fossil-scm.org) for the same purpose. It is super nice that the wiki is integrated with the source code I'm working on <i>and</i> the bug tracker.

Garrett Lisi's An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything TiddlyWiki:<p><a href="http://deferentialgeometry.org/" rel="nofollow">http://deferentialgeometry.org/</a>

Personally I'm using Dropbox for stuff like this, using PlainText on iOS devices, Notational Velocity (well, NvAlt) on my Mac and increasingly [Deft](<a href="http://jblevins.org/projects/deft/" rel="nofollow">http://jblevins.org/projects/deft/</a>) from within Emacs.<p>I know, there's Org Mode, but I'm more a free-form guy, same reason why I never used one of those monstrously popular GTD applications…

Here's a vote for Instiki (<a href="http://instiki.org" rel="nofollow">http://instiki.org</a>), a super simple wiki clone written in Ruby (that's pretty straightforward to hack on, which is a pretty important consideration when using wikis for 'non-traditional' purposes).

I mainly use org-mode for detailed notes. Github (kind of) understands them so I now include README.org files.<p>I also recommend <a href="http://workflowy.com" rel="nofollow">http://workflowy.com</a> for capturing information. I'd pay for an iPad app that would sync with it.

Took a nibble sometime back and was surprised by how well it did what it promised---that however was the problem. Hard to adapt to someone else's idea of a good time. I found it easier to revert to previous home grown methods and madness...

I use Workflowy to do this stuff.

Any Mac users who are interested in having a personal wiki should take a hard look at VoodooPad (<a href="http://flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/" rel="nofollow">http://flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/</a>).

Can't save on latest dev chrome (15.0.854.0 dev), getting this error:<p>The original file '/home/yop/Documentos/wiki2/empty.html' does not appear to be a valid TiddlyWiki

i use .txt

I use MediaWiki myself.

+1 Evernote

I've been keeping a wikipedia on myself, _everything_ about me and who I am, what I've done and who I want to be in a wiki for the last 4 years. It has been the most illuminating thing I've ever done, and I'm so happy I took the plunge that first day. Everything is in it, taxes, dental, computers, girlfriends, projects, outcomes, desires, todo, and thousands of other categories.<p>Looking back on my life through the wikipedia, I see a very different person than my own memory remembers. You'd be astonished how much stuff your brain removes for lack of use. I just use bluefish editor with basic html files. I've got hotkeys to make templates and. The root node is my full name, even the universe itself falls under that category, because the only way I know the universe exists is through my observations. The most gratifying part is the page outlining my geneology, I have information documented about my DNA line going up 3 levels, and if you make a point to get really detailed information on your parents, grand parents and great grand parents (biological) You'll see health problems and DNA related hardware issues. I discovered programmers and a certain abilities/disabilities run in my mother's side, I'm a programmer. With enough analysis I could probably identify the gene sequences, and thus help my offspring by telling them what their problems are going to be before they experience them, by looking at dominant and recessive traits.

blah. Blogging FTW :)