TiddlyWiki - A Minor Tip

I use TiddlyWiki for pretty much all my campaign notes these days. The combination of hyper-linking and a single self-contained file (minus images), makes it a very useful tool for my style of GMing. I went so far as to write a couple of brief tutorials on using it in my old RPG Dumping Ground blog:

• TiddlyWiki Tutorial - Part I
• TiddlyWiki Tutorial - Part II

One of the things I mention in part two of the tutorials is transclusion, a feature that allows you to insert a tiddler within a tiddler. Today's tip is an extension of that feature.



Let's say you have two tiddlers called Alpha and Beta. Alpha uses transclusion to include the contents of Beta. The two tiddlers look like this:

Alpha

Some text about Alpha.
<<tiddler [[Beta]]>>

Beta

Some text about Beta.


Alpha now reads like this:

Alpha

Some text about Alpha.
Some text about Beta.

The problem here is if you want to edit Beta while reading Alpha, you have to dig around and find it with a search or through the sidebar listings. There's a Better Way (TM). It takes a little discipline and structure, but it really speeds up editing. The first step is to choose a header style to label tiddlers that will be transcluded, and use it consistently. I use the "!!!" header as it includes a faint horizontal ruler and looks nice to my eye. In each tiddler the first line should be:

!!! Beta

That makes Alpha above read like this:

Alpha

Some text about Alpha.

Beta
Some text about Beta.

"OK," you're thinking, "how does that make things better?" Well you're not quite done. The next step is to bracket the header as a link like so:

!!! [[Beta]]


Now Alpha appears as above, but the Beta title is a link to the Beta tiddler. Voila, done! If you need to edit Beta you can get to it with a single click rather than having to dig through the sidebar tools.

Hope this is useful to someone!