Live data from Hacker News

Widdler is a single binary that serves up TiddlyWikis

github.com

41–50 of 52 posts

Re: Widdler is a single binary that serves up TiddlyWikis

#42

Wow, that is just 357 lines of Go code. So much of my work life is using complex systems in AWS and GCP that are beyond my ability to understand “turtles all the way down.” It is refreshing to see something so simple and focused on one thing. In the early days of Ruby on Rails, I had the source code to Ruby and for Ruby on Rails on my laptop and it was all fairly readable. Those days are long gone.

That really seems like a lot of code just to do the job of cp. Perhaps their time would be better spent thinking up some way to prevent a TiddlyWiki from becoming a wormable nightmare.

Na, cp doesn’t cut it :p - if it was that trivial of a task I wouldn’t have taken the time to write it!

Thanks for your opinion on where my time is better spent though, I don’t know what I was thinking.. building a tool to solve a problem I had and releasing it completely free of charge! I’ll know better next time!

Re: Widdler is a single binary that serves up TiddlyWikis

#44
You love to see it! I think this is a reasonable tool for a large set of usecases. Though many will be served just as well with file synchronization and other local saving tools, I like the simplicity in that single binary.

I use my TW every day like a madman (https://philosopher.life/#⧖). I'd like to submit https://github.com/OokTech/TW5-Bob as a powerful (though perhaps not as simple) alternative. That's what most of my household uses (one is aiming to switch over soon).

Re: Widdler is a single binary that serves up TiddlyWikis

#46
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that LOC count include dependencies?

If you want to make something from scratch, you must first invent the universe. Anyway, I wouldn't count the kind of simple, focused libraries dependencies Widdler relies on as additional LOC. As a rule of thumb, if it's something that wouldn't make me blink an eye if I found it was in the python stdlib, it gets a pass from me. Only the webdav library might not fit this. This is subjective, of course. If anyone has a…

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” - Carl Sagan.

Re: Widdler is a single binary that serves up TiddlyWikis

#47

Do people not look up the names they plan to use for their products?

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Widdler is a single binary that serves up TiddlyWikis

#48

A propos the single binary wiki server. Last time I was looking for something of this kind, I stumbled upon Fossil SCM, which also includes an implementation of Wiki [1]. Editing can be done in Markdown, all version-controlled, there's user support built-in, the whole thing basically resides in a repository, which is a kind of a SQLite db. The wikis can be imported from text files too. It may be not fancy-looking, bu…

By the authors of Sqlite. High quality code that is probably going to be around and well maintained for long. Not unimportant when using it as a personal knowledge system.

Re: Widdler is a single binary that serves up TiddlyWikis

#49

Wow, that is just 357 lines of Go code. So much of my work life is using complex systems in AWS and GCP that are beyond my ability to understand “turtles all the way down.” It is refreshing to see something so simple and focused on one thing. In the early days of Ruby on Rails, I had the source code to Ruby and for Ruby on Rails on my laptop and it was all fairly readable. Those days are long gone.

The trick seems to be that all the complexity is in the html file and runs in the browser. The server is just a basic WebDAV server. It looks like the entire wiki implementation is copied to a new file when you create a new wiki page. It's a 2.3 MB file, which seems like a lot to download when you visit a new page.

> It's a 2.3 MB file, which seems like a lot to download when you visit a new page.

It is, But I feel it's still better than what ever framework they're using nowadays to generate doc/wiki for APIs which hijacks Ctrl-F with a useless pop-up which rarely gets me what I need[1]. Please bring back plain HTML document pages.

[1] https://stripe.com/docs/api

Re: Widdler is a single binary that serves up TiddlyWikis

#50
post #5

This is AWESOME! My biggest annoyance with TiddlyWiki has been the ergonomics of saving. I've been using TiddlyDesktop, but that thing has some questionable privacy because it's based on Chromium. One time, I had it running in the background while working on something completely unrelated, and I got a Chrome-style popup/alert warning me about a network printer being disconnected. I didn't even have Chrome installed o…

> My biggest annoyance with TiddlyWiki has been the ergonomics of saving.

I've tried to address this with https://tiddlyhost.com/ (and in the past with http://tiddlyspot.com/ ).

Post reply on HN