13th
twikrad: TiddyWeb Text Editing
I woke up Friday thinking “I ought to work on the TiddlyWeb documentation”. Then I thought “I hate editing in a web browser I want my vim”.
Similar thoughts happened a few years ago at Socialtext resulting in a few half assed attempts to use Perl or bash plus the REST API to GET some stuff into $EDITOR and then PUT it back. Over time the client-side libraries improved and one fine weekend Luke Closs created wikrad, a terminal-based browser and editor for Socialtext workspaces.
I don’t know if this is still true, but back when I was still there, wikrad completely revolutionized how the Socialtext developers used their various wikis. Instead of the tediously slow interactivity of the web plus the tediously noisy and also slow interactivity of a GUI browser here was nippy little wikirad making editing a relative dream. Gardening of the wikis skyrocketed.
So Friday morning I decided “I’m going twist wikrad to work with TiddlyWeb. It’s all just HTTP, should be easy.”
And indeed it was. Although my initial hopes to create a server-agnostic adaptation layer were a little premature, I was able to hack and slash at the code until a new thing was born: twikrad.
I’ve started using it today to get back to the original documentation task, thinking a bit about future development of TiddlyWeb. I must say, it’s splendid. Doesn’t do much, but what it does it does just fine.
As is often the case when I start doing any significant editing in a wiki, I find myself thinking about wikitext, especially the syntax thereof. Some people care about wikitext, others don’t. I find that those that don’t usually think of it is as a way to quickly create something that will be presented as HTML. I don’t think of it that way. Wikitext is a writing tool optimized for creating two things: connections and voids. The connections reify understandings shared by the person or people using the text. The voids show what is not yet understood but may need to be.
When thinking about wikitext in those terms a couple things become more clear:
- Vertical whitespace is a useful aspect of readability. Syntaxes which work against readability of the source wikitext are working against quality writing.
- Free links and their associated syntactic cruft are a barrier both to good writing and to creating connections and voids. More on this in an old blog posting.
The TiddlyWeb documentation is maintained, for hopefully obvious reasons, in the TiddlyWiki syntax. I don’t really like it. Interestingly much of the problem is not with the syntax itself (although it does have one of the noisiest free link syntaxes around) but with the techniques one uses to overcome the apparent flaws in the standard rendering to HTML.
Which is really just to say that the form of writing matters to what gets written and I’m glad I’ve got a tool that lets me play with that.
