Sure. I'd ask you not to assume anything about my background as you're 
likely to be wrong.

My point is that I can FEEL the power that's in TW5, but it is obfuscated. 
I suspect most users get over it and after a while can't remember the pain 
it takes to use beyond the very very basics. I want to use this tool (or 
something like it) for a non-technical hobby. I'd expect a wiki tool to be 
pretty much non-technical and aimed at the casual user. After writing code 
and mentoring others all week I don't usually want to learn another tool 
that I can't leverage in my career, and TW5 is teetering on the brink of 
being just that too much technical to use.

That said, a tutorial or two on doing simple things like "How do I create 
lists of tiddlers that have something in common, like a table of contents?" 
would go a long ways towards making this easier for everyone.

On Sunday, January 13, 2019 at 4:58:32 PM UTC-5, TonyM wrote:
>
> Jeff,
>
> There has being a lot of "water under the bridge" in this thread. I think 
> its important to recognise there are a couple of new concepts in TiddlyWiki 
> that also makes it a powerful solution. until grasped it can be a little 
> frustrating, and from my experience it can be a little more difficult for 
> those with a lot of procedural programming language experience.
>
> The payoff is great so please bare with it.
>
> As a community we each have the power to improve TiddlyWiki so please 
> continue to contribute.
>
> Regards
> Tony
>
> On Monday, January 14, 2019 at 8:12:36 AM UTC+11, Jeff Wilson wrote:
>>
>> Unnecessary (accidental) complexity is NEVER justified. Essential 
>> complexity is something we have to live with.
>>
>> Simplicity is obtained when all accidental complexity is removed. I have 
>> no problem with complex tools; I use source code IDEs like Intellij, Visual 
>> Code, and Eclipse almost everyday.
>>
>> Undoubtedly much of my problems with TiddlyWiki is that I don't have a 
>> good mental model of how it works. But the documentation is awful, so that 
>> does not help. For example, I was trying to figure out how to create a list 
>> of all tiddlers with a tag equal to the name of the current page. Where do 
>> I find that information? I type "list" in the search field, and I get 323 
>> matches. The first one that looks reasonable is "list Operator", so I click 
>> on that and get something like this:
>> purpose select titles via a list field
>> input <https://tiddlywiki.com/#Filter%20Syntax> ignored
>> ! input a selection of titles <https://tiddlywiki.com/#Title%20Selection>
>> parameter <https://tiddlywiki.com/#Filter%20Parameter> R = a reference 
>> <https://tiddlywiki.com/#TextReference> to a field 
>> <https://tiddlywiki.com/#TiddlerFields> or property 
>> <https://tiddlywiki.com/#DataTiddlers> of a particular tiddler
>> output the titles stored as a title list 
>> <https://tiddlywiki.com/#Title%20List> at R
>> ! output those input titles that are not mentioned at R
>>
>> R can reference either a field or a property. See TextReference 
>> <https://tiddlywiki.com/#TextReference> for the syntax.
>>
>>    - If neither is specified, the list field is used by default. So 
>>    [list[T]] outputs the titles listed in the list of tiddler T.
>>    - If R consists of only a field or a property, the tiddler part of 
>>    the reference defaults to the current tiddler 
>>    <https://tiddlywiki.com/#Current%20Tiddler>. So [list[!!tags]] outputs 
>>    the titles listed in the tags field of the current tiddler.
>>
>> Examples <https://tiddlywiki.com/#list%20Operator%20(Examples)>
>>
>> Ooookay... I don't know if that helps or not. Let's click the "Examples" 
>> link:
>>
>> These examples make use of the Days of the Week 
>> <https://tiddlywiki.com/#Days%20of%20the%20Week> tiddler.
>>
>> [list[HelloThere]]Try it
>>
>> [list[Days of the Week!!short]]Try it
>>
>> At this point, I still don't know what to type in my tiddler.  It looks 
>> like it should be something like "[list[<foo>]]" where foo somehow 
>> indicates "all tiddlers with a tag equal to the title of the current page", 
>> but there's not clue how to figure out what "foo" should really be.
>>
>> Sometime later I find the tiddler, "ListWidget". Clicking that is 
>> promising, this one actually looks like it might be the right thing. One of 
>> the examples is:
>>
>> <$list filter="[tag[ListWidget]sort[title]"/>
>>
>> This actually works, but it requires me to type the name of the current 
>> tiddler as the tag name. Surely there's a way to get the title of the 
>> current tiddler to automatically populate?? Somewhere I read that the title 
>> of the current Tiddler was in a field that could be referenced like 
>> "!!title". Try that, and no dice.
>>
>> So, I reason, there must be a link to the filter syntax on this page, and 
>> sure enough, here it is! "tiddler filter"! I click that and get a huge list 
>> of filters, but never fear, there are short descriptions and links to 
>> describe each. I randomly click around on several trying to figure out 
>> which one works for my usecase, but can't seem to find one suitable. Or 
>> maybe I'm not giving it the right parameters. Who knows!?
>>
>> I eventually (hours later) find an example in another user's TiddlyWiki. 
>> (For the record, I'm using filter="[all[current]tagging[]sort[title]]". It 
>> works. I don't know if it is the best filter to use for my example, but 
>> hey, at this point I will accept anything that moves me forward.) I don't 
>> know if I would have ever figured out that particular combination of 
>> filters, but hey, whatever.
>>
>> Now my task was easy, and it was probably a super, super common usecase: 
>> I want to create a page hierarchy and be able to view that hierarchy. 
>> Shouldn't there be an article or tutorial somewhere on common ways to 
>> structure Tiddlers?
>>
>> Sorry for the long rant, but I'm rather upset that I've wasted two days 
>> on this tool.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Saturday, January 12, 2019 at 10:23:06 PM UTC-5, TonyM wrote:
>>>
>>> I empathise, and have thought the same way, but I am starting to see how 
>>> tiddlywiki raises our expectations to exceed what it currently achives. 
>>> Most often a work around exists, or the community starts to digest changes 
>>> to come. The key is the community, conversations and change. Its not that 
>>> tw is not mature, its that it continues to evolve even although in many 
>>> respects it already surpasses the competition in capabilities (if not 
>>> simplicity). 
>>>
>>> In my view Far too often today, simplicity is the result of the startup 
>>> culture, which wants to profit from minimalist solutions, to fund the 
>>> development of more comprehencive solutions by charging and taxing their 
>>> very same clients. *Unnesasary compexity *is desirable but not at the 
>>> cost of capability, unnessasariily simple things fragment what we need to 
>>> use into too many parts.
>>>
>>>

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