Markdown plus TiddlyWiki: Your Searchable, Non-Hierarchical Logbook

What is Markdown?

When jotting down notes digitally, I usually prefer writing in an editor to opening some RAM-intensive word processor. A while ago, I discovered the Markdown format for writing quick notes without having to put much thought on formatting.

It’s one of Markdown’s strengths that besides a few features for bold, italics and header size, you don’t have to worry about how your document will look. This helps you focus on the informational content of your note.

Markdown is a subset of HTML’s features mapped to more legible, easy-to-remember syntax. Unfortunately, there are different standards used by different websites and platforms, but the core Markdown syntax is accepted nearly universally.

Problem and Solution

Though I like using Markdown to record notes for myself and my teams, having Markdown files distributed around different places in my hard drive means that over time, many notes often are looked at once and then ignored, or in the worst case, completely rewritten, because I’ve forgotten that I ever wrote them in the first place.

TiddlyWiki is the solution to this problem. In contrast to note-taking apps like Microsoft OneNote, notes (called Tiddlers) are not stored in separate “notebooks” and “sections”, but instead all stored in one big pot, linked to each other via Tiddler tags and always accessible via the Tiddly search bar. Add Markdown support with the Markdown Plugin

Instead of wasting time deciding what notes belong in which notebook, section or page, Tiddly lets you put them all in one and group related notes into sets and subsets by using one or multiple tags. Need a table of contents? Just add it as a tag!

Bonus Features

• Create Markdown note templates for notes of the same type:

  

• Render Markdown as you write:

  

• Save to Github or Gitlab

Conclusion

My original motivation for using TiddlyWiki was to keep a searchable record of what I said in each day’s standup, since I was writing it down beforehand anyway. But it’s proving to be useful for reminders, to do lists and other private notes, too. Definitely worth a test!