TiddlyWiki is a “non-linear personal web notebook,” as well as an exemplar project in the open source community. It can be a note-taking or information-ordering system in a similar vein to Obsidian or Notion, although TiddlyWiki was launched back in 2004. It can also be thought of as producing a wiki with interactive components.

However, as I discovered to my cost, TiddlyWiki has never had a strong “start here,” because it is not tailored to one specific task. Obsidian, by comparison, has the advantage of a clear vision of what it does. TiddlyWiki bewilders you with options at first because it hasn’t been designed to be sold. The community focus is on adapting it to different use cases.

So I’m going to take the advice in this explainer and use TiddlyDesktop while mentioning that there are plenty of other arrangements. It is, after all, just HTML and JavaScript. Let’s get started…