TiddlyDesktop

TiddlyDesktop is a special purpose web browser for working with locally stored TiddlyWikis. See http://tiddlywiki.com/ for more details of TiddlyWiki.

See this video tutorial for an overview of installing and using TiddlyDesktop on Windows and OS X:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3Bggkm7paA

It is based on nw.js, a project created and developed in the Intel Open Source Technology Center:

https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js

Download and Install

Download the Windows, linux or Mac binary .zip files from:

https://github.com/TiddlyWiki/TiddlyDesktop/releases

Unzip into a folder and run TiddlyWiki.app or nw.exe and for linux nw

Note that TiddlyDesktop will not work correctly from a Windows UNC network share (eg \\MY-SERVER\SHARE\MyFolder). You should map the network share to a local drive, and run it from there.

Linux AppImage

Linux releases are also available in the AppImage format. The AppImages are compatible with glibc-based Desktop Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch Linux. The AppImages are not compatible with musl-based Linux distributions such as Alpine Linux, nor are they compatible with Linux server distributions; Server distributions don't provide enough of the required dependencies.

To use an AppImage, your Linux distribution must provide fusermount3, which is typically provided in a package named fuse3.

Before you can execute an AppImage, you must set the executable permission:

chmod u+x tiddlydesktop-*-v*.AppImage

Note that AppImages are not currently included in TiddlyDesktop releases. The suggested workaround is to fork this repo in GitHub, and then push a dummy commit to the master branch. That will trigger the CI and produce an AppImage, which you can then access.

NixOS

To install TiddlyDesktop on NixOS, you first need to add this repo to your configuration.nix; Using a let expression at the top of the file is a good approach:

let
  twdesktop = let
    rev = "Set this to the TiddlyDesktop Git revision that you want to install.";
  in import (fetchTarball "https://github.com/TiddlyWiki/TiddlyDesktop/archive/${rev}.tar.gz") { };
in
 ...

Then add the attribute name (which is twdesktop in the example above) to your systemPackages:

...
environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
   ...
   twdesktop
];
...

In addition to the method described above, the tiddlydesktop package is available as a Nix Flake; See https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Flakes to read more about Flakes. Simply use the Flake input github:TiddlyWiki/TiddlyDesktop. For example, you can run TiddlyDesktop with the command nix run github:TiddlyWiki/TiddlyDesktop.

Usage

Multiple Configurations

To have separate mutliple instances of TiddlyDesktop (for example, separate Personal and Professional instances), you can pass the --user-data-dir argument. e.g. /opt/TiddlyDesktop/nw --user-data-dir=/mnt/data/TiddlyWiki/config. The property should be a directory to use for holding configuration data.

Developer Tools

The F12 key opens the Chromium developer tools for the current window.

Debugging With VSCode

Instructions for Windows 10 64-bit (updates for other OSs welcome).

• Required software: VScode, Debugger for NWjs plugin installed in vscode
• Download the latest version of TiddlyDesktop-win64-v0.0.15 and unzip it to keep only four folders: html, images, js, tiddlywiki and package.json file
• Download nwjs-sdk-v0.69.1-win-x64, put it in C:\Users\your username.nwjs folder and unzip it. After unzipping you can see the nw.exe program in the .nwjs\nwjs-sdk-v0.69.1-win-x64 folder to indicate that it is correct. (Again, you can use Ctrl + shift + p in vscode to bring up the command to execute the NWjs Install command and select the version to install)
• Use vscode to open the TiddlyDesktop-win64 folder
• Modify the "main" field in the package.json file to "html/main.html"
• Click 'Debug' and select nwjs to automatically create the configuration file laugh.json (no need to modify it). Then click Start to debug.

Releasing with Continuous Integration

1. Update the version number in package.json, plus any other changes that should be included
2. Run npm install --save
3. Make a commit and push it
4. Check the build output in the GitHub Actions tab
5. Tag that commit with git tag v0.0.21, the version number you just updated in package.json
6. Push that tag with git push v0.0.21 and a draft release will be created
7. Edit the draft release: add release notes, edit whatever else might need to be changed. Download its build files and test them
8. Switch the draft release to be a public release once it's tested and ready

Building

1. Run download-nwjs.sh to download the latest nw.js binaries
2. Download the TiddlyWiki5 repo from https://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5 to a sibling directory to the TiddlyDesktop repo called "TiddlyWiki5"
3. Run bld.sh
4. Execute output/mac/TiddlyWiki.app or output/win/nw.exe or output/linux32/nw or output/linux64/nw