I’m trying something with TiddlyWiki. My public wiki has over 3,000 entries. As much as I try keeping notes in my array of Org-mode files, I almost always find what I’m looking for in the wiki instead. I’ve also kept a local, private “Lab Notebook” wiki in TiddlyWiki. It competes with my Org-mode daybook and journals, though, so I’ve neglected it.
It occurred to me that I’ve enjoyed using TiddlyWiki for public notes. However, I can’t only keep a public wiki, because not everything belongs “out there”. Just most of everything. That’s where the Lab Notebook comes in.
For example, I recently sold my Leica M6. Here’s the wiki entry. I wanted to record that it was sold, so I did that. But, I also wanted to record who I sold it to and where I shipped it. Those details don’t belong on the public wiki, so now what?
I dusted off the Lab Notebook wiki and started making entries there again. This isn’t a “Zettelkasten” or anything fancy like that. It’s just a stream of entries for recording technical notes throughout the day, with some links between them. And it’s all in a single HTML file. But here’s the kicker. If I have a private note that I want public, I just drag and drop it from my private wiki to my public one. In TiddlyWiki, that means simply dragging any link to any note (aka “tiddler”) between wikis. That’s a super handy feature.
Even better, in the Arc browser I open a split window with both wikis. I can write in either of them, and quickly drag content between them. It looks like this:
TiddlyWikis, side-by-side
That’s it. That’s the entire UI in Arc.
As always, this is mostly an experiment. It means taking fewer notes in Emacs, and that rarely lasts. On the other hand, this is easier and prettier and I have the magic of TiddlyWiki to keep me interested. I’ll let you know how it turns out.