Gollum VS TiddlyWiki

I’ve settled on similar setup. One nice thing about is there many tools that can work on this type of note setup, so you are not locked into one tool.

Working Copy works decently well on iOS. Gollum [1] on desktop operating systems provides a web interface to the notes. For some shameless self-promotion, I’ve been hacking on a clone of Gollum called Smeagol [2]. It is written in Rust so it is quite a bit faster to install and run on some of my low powered systems than installing Gollum.

[1]: https://github.com/gollum/gollum

However, if you are using a gui, you can use vimwiki and gollum together. Gollum is a web wiki.

Take a look at gollum or wikimd

Check out the Gollum wiki.

Another advantage layers on the source control: many source code management services will render your markdown and give you a search interface. GitHub popularized it. But other hosts like Azure Devops and GitLab support this as well. You can make a relatively pleasant document management system on top of this.

You can even run this on your own computer without an internet connection. Working Copy on iOS supports. Gollum, originally created by Tom Preston-Werner, strives to be compatiable with GitHub's wiki feature [2]. For my part, I've been learning Rust by writing a clone of Gollum called Smeagol [3].

Though really the point of the original article is: all these tool don't matter. Your plain text files can live longer than any of particular tool and continue to be useful.

[1] https://workingcopyapp.com/

[2] https://github.com/gollum/gollum

[3] https://smeagol.dev/

I just spent some time looking at this. There's no reason you can't use Obsidian with git. Obsidian just saves md files in a basic folder structure. You can git init in the root of your Obsidian vault directory (.gitignore your .obsidian folder). There's even an "Obsidian Git" community plugin that does the git work for you.

To serve your md files as a traditional wiki in browsers, there's a git backed wiki named Gollum that also uses md files in a basic folder structure. https://github.com/gollum/gollum You can see where I'm going with this.

Gollum doesn't have user authentication or anything fancy, it just renders and edits md files. I tried it. There didn't seem to be a difference between Obsidian's and Gollum's markdown. When I committed my entire Obsidian vault to a git repo, I could still choose to have Gollum serve the entire vault, or just a subdirectory in the repo. I could also disable all editing in Gollum.

While Obsidian is working directly with the md files, Gollum doesn't update until I actually commit the changes. Obsidian is basically an IDE for my wiki now.

I was mostly satisfied with Joplin syncing to OneDrive prior to today's experiment. But now I think Obsidian + Git + Gollum deserves a closer look. It might be a bit overkill for my personal wiki, but it could work in a team setting if everyone works on the wiki like they would a normal git project.

(Gollum)[https://github.com/gollum/gollum] can do that but that's a wiki.

I'd like to recommend Tiddlywiki. Happy to help you long-term with your goals too.

Thank you. I work hard on it. Each member of the house has their own, and it helps us understand each other. My [[Root Users]], [[chameleon]] [https://wiki.waifu.hause/] and [[Sphygmus]] [https://sphygm.us] have gorgeous Tiddlywikis. One HTML file, self-hosted, private unless you choose to share from your machine. If you ever have an interest in making one, you let me know. I'll do my best to help.

(For those not familiar: https://tiddlywiki.com/)

I do. I have a Pi I run as a server where it runs PiHole, PiVPN (Wireguard), and a personal Node environment. My main use case is to have a system I can SSH into and develop personal projects. This works well because I have a few machines that I can’t develop locally. A work machine that I can mix personal work. An iPad that has no local shell (I use https://blink.sh for this). It works fantastically!

I’ve made a home “Are you in a meeting” website that everyone on my WiFi can point their browsers to. I have https://tiddlywiki.com instances running there. It manages my VPN when I’m out of the house. And I block a huge portion of ads when I use it as a DNS server.

tiddlywiki.com

Tiddlywiki seems (from a technical perspective) a little bit closer to what you're imagining:

https://tiddlywiki.com/

Sadly it doesn't let you edit WYSIWYG, ie when you click "Edit" it still transforms the page back into monospaced markup script.

Theoretically it should be possible to change that, but I have not looked at the codebase.

If you were to do this from the ground up you would probably:

* Enable .contentEditable on the whole page (or at least sections like )

* Add a floating toolbar for formatting controls (and a save button)

* Do the submit in javascript, so the page doesn't have to fully reload.

* Possibly add a toggle edit button? Or would people be comfy being able to accidentally edit pages whilst reading (as long as they realise they have to hit "save" to make a change). This might ruin some people's navigation key shortcuts in their browser (eg users of Vimium).

For personal or small-team use I could see this being good. For larger teams it would be a nightmare, as accidental edits would be common. The formal 3/4 step editing process has its problems, but it's a useful barrier against the tides.

There are a couple of "single file" solutions in existence, but they have incredibly specific use cases...Like the EPUB format, and the TiddlyWiki project. At the end of the day, it likely just boils down to "There's no demand nor foreseeable need for such a format." Sure, use cases could be contrived and built towards, but it's a solution looking for a problem at the moment.