Two weeks ago, I wrote about some of the challenges I have when working with TiddlyWiki. In a nutshell, TiddlyWiki is better when you want other people to read technical documentation you otherwise much more comfortable writing inside Emacs org-mode.

My problem is that converting org-mode to WikiText (the way TiddlyWiki works) is a friction point, and I am not willing to leave the comforts of org-mode in favor of TiddlyWiki’s UI and hotkeys. They are OK, but they do not compare to Emacs and good muscle memory.

The solution (or rather, a workaround) that I found is to export my org-mode buffer to HTML with org-mode, and then let TiddlyWiki handle the rest. I documented this process in my wiki as part of recording the workflow.

There are still a few issues, of course. Certain HTML tags still need to be converted to WikiText (as I noted in the example in the wiki article) to reflect CSS options that otherwise do not trigger with the raw HTML code yet; this is something I can probably fix down the line. The other issue is that certain TiddlyWiki functions, such as integrated macros and lists, cannot be written inside org-mode because they contain square brackets that serve as links within org-mode.

Fortunately, it’s easy enough to fix those in the exported temporary HTML buffer before pasting back into a TiddlyWiki tiddler.

It’s been fun going back to TiddlyWiki and seeing some of the recent and exciting changes they’ve introduced. I will always have a soft spot for TiddlyWiki, since it was the first personal database I tried, before I discovered Emacs org-mode.