kishorebhargava

I don’t know about you, but I seem to have a perpetual file called notes.txt that lives on every machine that I use. Earlier when I used Notepad the file always started with a .LOG so that it automatically put a date/time stamp every time I opened it but later on with all the different text editors I used, I have other macros that do that job for me. You may ask what is this notes.txt? Well, its very simple really. Everytime I need to just quickly jot down some info I just open up notes.txt and add stuff into it. Phone numbers, tips and tricks, URLs just about everything finds its way into this file.

For a long time I have been wondering what to replace this with, cause though it works, it is rather a kludgy way of getting things done. When I started using KDE, the first thing I tried was Knotes, its a nice little program but its essentially a sticky notes (PostIt!) kind of replacement not really what I was looking for. I do use it for that purpose but notes.txt still lives on.

Recently, a friend pointed me to Basket, this has major possibilities and in fact I have actually populated it with most of the stuff from my original notes file. The program is quite clever, it has different types of items that you can add, like ToDos, rich-text, images, URIs just about anything and then its also easy to move stuff around between applications etc very useful indeed. But I was still not quite happy with it. I decided I needed something slightly different, maybe something more like a Wiki.

With the ever growing popularity of Wiki’s I decided to try one out myself. I setup MediaWiki on my website and started using it. Great stuff really,  but it became a bit cumbersome to organise data. Its very useful if you have multiple contributors, but for one person managing it, rather than helping it hinders thought. I needed something simpler and locally on my notebook. I have been wondering if I really want to install MediaWiki on my notebook but decided against it. And thats when I came across TiddlyWiki!

TiddlyWiki is a great little app! its basically an HTML file with JavaScript. It behaves like a Wiki and looks like a Wiki and its fast and very easy to use. Go grab the empty file on the TiddlyWiki site and get started right away, you won’t regret it!  The site mentions that it works best in Firefox which is my browser of choice and I have no idea what would happen in Internet Explorer or any other brower. Would be curious to hear on that.

Gotta love free and opensource software!

Cheers…Kishore
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