With only a few tiddlers, finding things is no big deal. But if you're serious enough about organizing information to be interested in TiddlyWiki, you're likely planning to have a lot of content, so you'll need something better than reading through the list of recently changed items.

It's important to remember that while TiddlyWiki has excellent functionality for searching and querying tiddlers, it's a garbage-in, garbage-out tool: its ability to locate ideas and find connections between them is only as good as your commitment to understanding what information you're putting in, how you might want to use it, and how you should organize it. TiddlyWiki is your partner in understanding your notes and your ideas, not a magic box that spits insights back at you after you follow a prescriptive set of steps. We already discussed this mindset in some detail in the previous chapter, but as we look at the mechanisms for finding things in this chapter, we'll keep coming back to the habits you need to make them work well.

In this chapter

• Searching – TiddlyWiki allows fast and convenient full-text searching, although it doesn't look in every field of every tiddler.
• Browsing Your Tiddlers – TiddlyWiki provides a variety of options for getting an overview of many tiddlers at once.
• Tiddler Titles – Carefully naming tiddlers and concepts has many benefits, but is often more art than science.
• Naming Conventions – Naming conventions are rules about how sets of things should be named. Creating your own conventions will make it easier to create titles and easier to find tiddlers later.
• Slicing Up Content – We slice content up into tiddlers by modeling nouns related to our subject matter.
• Creating Hierarchies with a Table of Contents – TiddlyWiki can produce hierarchical tables of contents from tag structures.
• Ordering Tiddlers – A set of tiddlers, such as those with a particular tag, can be given a specific order using a tiddler list.
• Creating Evergreen Notes – TiddlyWiki can prevent your old notes from withering and being lost when you use its features appropriately.