I use Tiddlywiki as a writing tool, and as a heavily customised Zettelkasten (an ‘index box’ of notes). I love how readily this toolkit can be tailored to suit my workflow and requirements. That means there isn’t really a best version, since it can become what you make of it. I was slightly confused when I started, since it’s different from other writing tools. But you can just start simple and slowly add the functionality that you like to use. Reminding myself to document all my changes and experiments, inside my TW, really helps. Superficially, it’s just a wiki app, but there’s so much more to it than that.

I find Soren Bjornstad’s online version,Tzk, very inspiring. It really shows some amazing possibilities for a personal Zettelkasten-style notebook. His GrokTiddlyWiki tutorial is fabulous too, but it’s a bit of a rabbit hole. Maybe better to just get started and then do the tutorials.

I love the look of Projectify and have used the notebook palettes that it comes with.

To enable backlinks I have found a couple of basic plug-ins really useful and would strongly recommend:

TWCrossLinks

This adds a footer to your notes to show backlinks and freelinks.

Relink

This enables automatic renaming of titles and other items across links.

For a to-do list, I greatly admire Projectify, but what I actually use is the simple but effective Chandler, written by the late Joe Armstrong. He talks you through how he wrote it, which in itself is a masterclass in how to customise TiddlyWiki.

Finally I’ll mention the active and very helpful user forum.

If you’d like to discuss any aspect of TiddlyWiki or note-making generally, I’m all ears.