Working with TiddlyWiki on iOS – Jag Talon

Working with TiddlyWiki on iOS – Jag TalonSkip to the content

I’ve been using TiddlyWiki for two months now, and I’m amazed at how versatile this piece of software is. Since it’s able to weave together all the disparate parts of my life, it’s become my go-to notebook for almost anything. I’ve become dependent on it for documenting and understanding my life.

But if TiddlyWiki is going to be my notebook for everything, I have to get it to work on my phone, too. I’ve been hesitant about it because I assumed that it would be a pain to work on WikiText without a keyboard, but it didn’t end up being as bad as I thought it would be. I also like that I get to look things up on my wiki while I’m away from my computer.

The first thing that I needed to do to get set up on my phone was to get an app called Quine. Even though TiddlyWiki is just an HTML file (there’s no server component here), saving can be a bit of a pain because browsers don’t allow websites to write directly into files. Quine is a modified browser specific for TiddlyWiki that lets you bypass that restriction.

Next, I needed to figure out how to sync the wiki between my computer and my phone. The simplest solution is to drop the wiki into a service like iCloud, Dropbox, or Resilio and call it a day. Any changes that I make on my phone would automatically sync with my computer and vise versa. If you’re thinking of doing this yourself, this might be good enough for you! Dropbox even lets you recover old versions of the file if you ever needed to revert back to them. 

But I wanted more control over my backups. I want to have the freedom to tweak the code and try out new themes and plugins without worrying about breaking my wiki. I wanted version control. I wanted Git on my phone.

I didn’t know if it was even possible to use Git on iOS, but I did a quick search and found Working Copy. All I had to was to link my GitHub account and point it to the right repository. GitHub now offers unlimited private repos for free, so I’ve taken advantage of that for backing up my wiki. Working Copy downloads the repo to my phone, and it makes the files available to third-party apps like Quine. 

While this is not as convenient as using Dropbox, it makes me feel more confident about my wiki’s integrity in the long run. I’m excited about this setup, and I hope I can keep this going in the years to come.

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Screenshots of Quine 2 and Working Copy. It shows how Quine integrates with Working Copy and what the Git repo looks like.