Denis Defreyne

Create a standalone wiki app

Up: Ideas for software projects

My implementation: Deniki.

Inspiration:

  • DokuWiki
  • Obsidian
  • TiddlyWiki
  • VoodooPad
  • MoinMoin

Goals:

  • Standalone desktop app
  • No filename restrictions (unlike Obsidian)
  • Visually pleasing
  • Minimal
  • Focus on perusing, not authoring (separate edit modes?)
  • File-based

Core principles:

  • Good built-in functionality trumps extensibility.
  • Installation must be trivial.

Non-features:

  • Web app
  • Authentication/authorization

A wiki, not a notes app

A wiki is very similar to, but nonetheless fundamentally different from a note-taking application. I use Bear and it is great for note-taking, but it’s not a wiki.

First difference: Can have multiple standalone/separate wikis. This rules out Bear which is not a wiki in the first place.

Second difference: Easy to create a new wiki without specifying a name for the wiki and/or a location to save to. Unlike Obsidian.

Third difference: No list of notes. Wikipedia does not have one.

Minimal effort to use

For this particular wiki software, it needs to be trivial to create a new wiki. Think: As easy as creating a new text document in TextEdit.

Personal wikis exist, but often are not easy to get to use. Just some examples:

  • MoinMoin uses Python 2.x which is a pain to install (needs something like pyenv or so).

  • DokuWiki requires setting up a web server and PHP. And this setup needs to be repeated (though is easier) if you want multiple DokuWiki instances.

  • TiddlyWiki needs dedicated software for updating the wiki, and you need to give the wiki a name and a place to store it before starting to use it.

This isn’t to say that these pieces of wiki software are bad — they are not — but they don’t fulfill the need of being trivially easy to start using.

Offline-only

Making it offline-only simplifies things greatly. No authentication, no authorization.

Syncing might still be a feature for later. In particular, it’d be nice to have wikis be editable on both macOS and iOS (I’ve got an iPhone). But it’d still be an offline-only application — just with syncing.

Note last edited May 2025.
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