Personal wiki: WikidPad, from a programmer’s point of view
In my introductory post on personal wikis, I briefly explained their use to organize personal knowledge. I also said I use WikidPad, personally. Here’s the rationale behind my choice.
Main points
WikidPad is a desktop application, so you have to install it locally, as opposed to wikis accessed through the Web. It works on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. You can download it here, and here’s a quick start guide.
The killer point, for me, is that WikidPad allows for quick edition and navigation. Speed is crucial: if you feel slowed down, chances are you’ll just give up or at least won’t use it with all benefits of a personal wiki.
WikidPad screenshot
Wikidpad main features are:
- Easy and quick edition of entries, with on-the-fly formatting and linking (explained bellow)
- Outline view (on the left) and other navigation helpers (ex: history of last accessed entries, useful keyboard shortcuts)
- More ways to structure your entries
- TODO lists produced by gathering TODOs on all entries
- Entries attributes, which allow you to list all entries that have a given attribute
- It’s open source, written in Python and can be extended with modules
- The data is stored in plain text, one .wiki file per entry
The “programmer’s point of view” in the title stems from the fact that the speed of edition might be achieved with more conventional edition behavior (WYSIWYG or Word’s style edition), but then one loses the wiki syntax which to a programmer (or simply nerd) is very appealing for being similar to plain text formats. That’s the unique mix of WikidPad, from what I gather.
Edition behavior: details
WikidPad has a sort of dual-mode of edition/viewing. An example is best to explain: if you mark a word be in *bold* (with asterisks), you don’t have to switch back to “formatted view” mode for it to be showed in bold: it’s shown that way while editing, on-the-fly.
Example of on-the-fly formatting
(++ is for title, *for bold*, _for italics_, etc.)
That turns out to be a real time saver, for me. With all other wiki software I have used, edition is done differently, in either of two ways.
In one case, there’s a constant switching back-and-forth between “formatted view” and “edit view”. TiddlyWiki operates in this way, for example. The thing is, most of the activity done in a wiki involves small modifications here and there, so this “switch” happens often enough to make it cumbersome, to my experience.
In the other case, the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) behavior, you don’t have to switch, but you format using buttons or keyboard shortcuts, just like in Word (ie. you select the text and click “B” to make it bold). Most people will probably find this a better option, but as a programmer (or just a nerd?), I love the fact that there’s nothing hidden: what I write is all there is in the .wiki file that represents the entry (ie. you work directly at “source” level).
Side note: programmers will recognize WikidPad’s behavior as being the one of an IDE (integrated development environment), esp. for the code coloring aspect. That’s why WikidPad motto is “an IDE for your thoughts”. It also features auto-completion of WikiWords, as another similarity.
Outline view
Example outline (here for the help, which is itself a wiki)
A killer principle of wikis (vs traditional note organizers/outliners) is their very flexible structure: you’re not restricted to having a note be a “child” of one and only one note. You can link from any entry to any other. Yet hierarchies are very intuitive, since we’re used to placing files in folders, and folders in other folders, etc.
WikidPad gives you both. Sure, you can link from any entry to any other one. But an entry linking to another one automatically becomes a “parent” in the hierarchy (outline) displayed to the left. And yes: an entry may have multiple parents that way. (Surprisingly, this does not cause any universe-shattering paradoxes)
This outline gives you yet another way to navigate in the wiki and speed things up.
Extensibility
WikidPad is open source and written in Python, a language which many programmers like to work with for personal projects. WikidPad allows you to write and load your own extensions.
Some extensions you can readily use allow you to visualize the topology of your wiki (with GraphViz) or include mathematical formulas or graphs (MimeTex, Ploticus).
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