TiddlyWiki5, Raspberry Pi and Vim: A guide for the command line aficionado

Introduction

The practice of personal information management has always left me unsatisfied; a square hole in the puzzle of life that you just don’t have a square peg for. After looking into options for square pegs I’ve opted for a zettelkasten method implemented via a TiddlyWiki.

I wanted to host this on a Raspberry Pi and access this on all the computers on my local network (e.g. tablets, phones, etc). However I also wanted the ability to directly edit tiddlers (the basic unit of information in TiddlyWiki) using neovim, so I don’t always have to go through a browser. Seen as I was using neovim I also wanted to be able to initiate a tiddler from the command line - copying a title in from whatever I’m reading and having it CamelCase create a tiddler in Tiddlywiki as per the above video.

This proved problematic, which I explain in the long-winded and unnecessary background, so I thought worth recording the steps I took on both the Raspberry Pi and my Linux box below.

Long-winded and unnecessary background

This turned out to be more difficult than I thought. The vanilla node.js installation of TiddlyWiki doesn’t play well with direct editing of tiddlers, i.e. editing the tiddlers requires a manual node restart before it appears in the browser. OokTech has an executable that does allow direct editing - but this doesn’t work on a Raspberry Pi. Not to fear however as OokTech also have a plugin which gives the same functionality.

So I used this for a number of months - however there was a snag. Every so often a tiddler would appear to save correctly after a browser edit, but on return the changes would have dissapeared. Not knowing exactly what the problem was my first thought was to upgrade to the latest version, in case this solved the problem¹. So I updated both TiddlyWiki5 and the OokTech plugin; at which point it stopped working altogether.

Rather than starting over again I wondered if there might be another way.

1. Raspberry Pi

First the steps you need to take with the Pi. This assumes you’ve installed the standard Pi OS (see Version control for the software used).

1a. Enable Port 8080

As blogged about previously, if you are using the default Raspberry Pi OS ports are shut down by default. These therefore need to be opened by entering the following into the Pi terminal:

sudo apt install ufw
sudo ufw allow ssh
sudo ufw enable
sudo ufw allow 8080

This installs Uncomplicated Firewall onto your Pi, enables it and then allows the port that your TiddlyWiki will be listening on.

1b. Install TiddlyWiki5 and Nodemon

At the terminal:

npm install tiddlywiki nodemon -g

The -g flag installs the software globally, rather than in a particular folder.

1c. Initiate a wiki

We now use the TiddlyWiki software just installed to initiate a fresh wiki. At the terminal:

tiddlywiki wiki --init server

This creates a directory called wiki which includes server-related components. You can change the name of the directory to whatever you wish, but the remainder of the instructions assume the directory is called wiki.

1d. Find your IP

Now we have to find the IP address of your Raspberry Pi on your local network and make a note of it. For the purposes of this tutorial we are going to say it is 192.168.0.12.

1e. Starting TiddlyWiki with nodemon

Ok, so now the fun bit, starting. If you weren’t bothered about editing the tiddlers in a text editor you could just simply go for:

tiddlywiki wiki --listen host=192.168.0.12

And if you go to http://192.168.0.12:8080/ in your browser you should see a new wiki.

All well and good, however this makes editing tiddlers in a text editor awkward. Using the above method means edits do not get reflected in the browser - or not without manually restarting the node instance of TiddlyWiki.

This is where nodemon comes in. Nodemon watches a directory and restarts a node process any time there is a change in that directory. It is commonly used for development purposes - if you are working on a JavaScript file you want node to be refreshed and reloaded every time you make a save - and not have to manually restart. However it can be used to look for changes to tiddlers, rather than code.

To do so enter at the terminal this intimidatingly long command:

nodemon --delay 30 -e tid --ignore 'wiki/tiddlers/$*.tid' --watch wiki/tiddlers/ $NVM_BIN/tiddlywiki wiki --listen host=192.168.0.19

At this point you can simply walk away leaving the terminal open and running if you have been directly inputting commands into your Raspberry Pi. If you are accessing your Pi remotely via SSH then close the terminal window itself without exiting the running program (on Manjaro i3 this is done via the mod-Shift-q keypress, but your distro will likely be different). This method of exit is required because closing the terminal via standard methods (e.g. ctrl-c followed by exit) will likely also kill nodemon.

So what does this do? The flags / arguments to nodemon are as follows:

• --delay 30 ensures that after a change nodemon waits 30 seconds before restarting. If this did not occur then the server would be constantly restarting.
• e tid tells nodemon that it needs to look for changes in files ending in tid, that is in tiddlers.
• --ignore 'wiki/tiddlers/$*.tid' ignores tiddlers that are generated by the system (which by convention start with $) and not the user.
• --watch wiki/tiddlers/ tells nodemon the folder to watch where changes will happen.
• $NVM_BIN/tiddlywiki wiki --listen host=192.168.0.19 lastly this is the previous command as at the start of the section, but as we aren’t running the command via node we have to explicitly tell nodemon where to find the tiddlywiki executable (in $NVM_BIN).

2. Desktop / Local machine

Switching back from the Raspberry Pi to your Linux machine, the following will allow (relatively) seamless editing in vim / neovim.

These steps assume you have generated SSH keys allowing you to access your Pi from your Linux machine - if not follow DigitalOcean’s excellent How To Set Up SSH Keys tutorial before anything else.

2a. Mapping a drive

So that we have the tiddlers accessible on our local machine, the wiki directory on the Pi needs to be mounted. Although the actual mount command is given in the tw shell script below, some initial steps need to be taken for this to work.

First create the mountpoint (e.g. where on your local system you want the tiddlers to appear):

mkdir ~/wiki

Now we need to install sshfs which allows us to mount a drive over SSH. I’m using Manjaro so it is:

pamac install sshfs

If you are using Ubuntu or derivative then it will be sudo apt install sshfs.

To make things a bit easier once we’ve decided where our tiddlers are mounted we will set this path as an environment variable so we aren’t having to retype the path again. We do this by editing our ~/.bash_profile (or whatever shell we use - I use zsh so it is ~/.zshenv)² to include:

export TIDDLYWIKIPATH=$HOME/wiki/tiddlers/

2b. Vim plugin

The vim-tiddlywiki plugin is absolutely outstanding for managing tiddlers in Vim. If you don’t use a plugin manager, install it into Neovim as follows:

 git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sukima/vim-tiddlywiki ~/.config/nvim/pack/sukima/start/vim-tiddlywiki

If you are using original Vim rather than Neovim, then the path above will need amending as Vim does not use the .config directory. Or simply use a plugin manager.

This plugin not only means that the tiddler format is recognised, but also allows you to create new tiddlers with the right metadata in place and jump to the other tiddlers using CamelCase links.

For full use you will also need to let the plugin know where you keep your tiddlers by adding the following line to your ~/.config/nvim/init.vim or ~/.vimrc, i.e.:

let g:tiddlywiki_dir=$TIDDLYWIKIPATH

2c. Command line editing

To make the process buttery smooth I want to automate my workflow. This being: read an article on the net, copy/paste the title of the article and have neovim open a tiddler already named using CamelCase. So for example, let’s say I want to take some notes on Hayek’s paper on open markets: The use of knowledge in society. I want to open a terminal, type tw The use of knowledge in society and start editing a tiddler named TheUseOfKnowledgeInSociety.tid in neovim.

Create a file named tw wherever you keep user-specific executable files (so for me this is ~/.local/bin/tw, but if you are using Ubuntu it will likely be ~/bin/tw) and copy / paste the following code. Alternatively you can download from the github repo. This code assumes that you’ve created your mount point at ~/wiki as above, if not then you will need to change the sshfs line.

#!/bin/bash

# Opens a new tiddlywiki tiddler named after arguments that follow commands
# Uses vim-tiddlywiki plugin to create metadata
# https://www.preciouschicken.com/blog/posts/tiddlywiki5-raspberry-pi-guide/

# Checks if pi is mounted, if not mounts in folder created earlier
if (( $(mount | grep -e 'pi@'| wc -l) == 0 ));
then     
	sshfs [email protected]:/home/pi/wiki "$(dirname $TIDDLYWIKIPATH)" -o reconnect
fi

# Replaces non-alphanumeric characters in arguments
arguments=$(echo $@ | sed "s/[’]//g")
arguments=$(echo $arguments | sed 's/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/ /g')

# CamelCase converts all arguments
tid_title=''
for word in $arguments
do
	# Changes argument to lowercase
	lowercasevar=${word,,}
	# Capitalises first character of argument
	sentencevar=${lowercasevar^}
	tid_title+="$sentencevar"
done

# Opens neovim with correct tiddler name
if [[ -f $TIDDLYWIKIPATH$tid_title'.tid' ]]
then
	# Updates metadata if tiddler exists
	nvim -c TiddlyWikiUpdateMetadata $TIDDLYWIKIPATH$tid_title'.tid'
else
	# Creates tiddler if not found
	nvim -c TiddlyWikiInitializeTemplate $TIDDLYWIKIPATH$tid_title'.tid'
fi

Then make this executable:

chmod a+x ~/.local/bin/tw

On next restart of terminal, typing tw The use of knowledge in society should create a new tiddler ready for us to type. If the tiddler already exists then the shell script will recognise that and update the metadata instead.

The shell script does its best to cope with non-alphanumeric characters. So apostrophes are deleted (We’re not really strangers gets changed to WereNotReallyStrangers) while it substitutes other non-alphanumerics characters for a space (so Knee-deep in the Big Muddy ends up as KneeDeepInTheBigMuddy). I’m sure there will be edge cases which will not work out - feel free to comment below.

A note on spawning

It is worth noting that nodemon can be a bit difficult to stop once it is started. One option is to find the process running and stop them individually, to quote one particular solution:

ps aux | grep -i nodemon, find out which process number nodemon is, then issue a kill -9 [process ID]

Or alternatively reboot the Pi. That can be much easier…

Version control

If this doesn’t work for you, it might be due to version conflicts. At the time of writing I was using:

• Pi: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2 running Raspbian GNU/Linux 10 (buster) armv7l. Node v14.11.0, npm v6.14.8. TiddlyWiki v5.1.23.
• Desktop: Manjaro Linux 21.0.7 Omara. zsh v5.8. neovim v0.4.4.

Conclusion

This is not perfect - for instance there is a 30 second delay between creating a tiddler on the command line and it being reflected in the browser. And there are probably all sorts of circumstances where the bash script will not work out. Square peg in a square hole or Linux kludge? Comments, feedback, etc below.

Addendum: Other options

A thread on the TiddlyWiki mailing list, subsequent to this post, pointed out a number of alternatives to using nodemon:

watch-fs plugin

The watch-fs TiddlyWiki plugin states that it “enables TiddlyWiki to watch the change in your disk, and if you edit one of your tiddler using editor likes VSCode and save it on the disk, the change will immediately reflected in the browser.”

TiddlyWiki API

An option suggested by Saq Imtiaz is instead of saving newly created tiddler files directly into the wiki directory, one could save the tiddler with a PUT request via cURL using the TiddlyWiki API; for example:

curl -X PUT -i 'http://192.168.0.12:8080/recipes/default/tiddlers/NewTiddlerTitle' --data '{
 "tags": "firstTag anotherTag",
 "creator": "gene",
 "modifier": "gene",
 "text": "The use of knowledge in society"
}' -H "X-Requested-With: TiddlyWiki"

Using this example as a basis a Vim plugin or a shell script called by Vim could be written.

TW5-Bob plugin

Although as previously covered this did not quite work out for me, the TW5-Bob plugin is also an alternative given that it offers “two-way real-time syncing between the browser and file system”.