Please can you give more detailed instructions for people new to coding?

[dcisbusy]

Hello David! Thank you so much for building this tool. I'm hoping to find it extremely useful!

However, I'm new to coding and so I have definitely done something wrong or missed out some steps that might seem obvious to more experienced users.

I have cloned the repo to my desktop and copied the wiki.html into the same folder, but when I try to run $ make in the Node.js command line I get this error message:

'$' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

Any help would be massively appreciated. Thank you!
Another David :)

[davidag]

Hello David! :)

To be honest, I haven't tested this on Windows, but let's see if we can make it work 😅

First of all, try removing the dollar sign, that's only there to represent a Unix shell prompt.

If the make command is not found, I'd say the only path forward is to put some Linux in your life Windows. I'm aware of two alternatives:

• Cygwin: I would try to follow the installer instructions and use the default options, except that you need to make sure the make package is installed. You can always run the setup.exe later and install it. When make is installed, you need pandoc available, which can be installed following the instructions and should work perfectly inside the Cygwin console.
• The Windows Subsystem for Linux: This installs a full Linux distro (Ubuntu by default). You would have to install node, pandoc and make using more specific tools (apt). I'd say this is a more complicated path if you're not familiar with Linux.

I hope this helps, let me know if something is not clear!

[dcisbusy]

Ah, sorry - I didn't realise this wasn't suitable for Windows. Thank you for your suggestions. I have tried the Cygwin approach, but got an error when it tried to install TiddlyWiki:

I'd be very grateful if you have any suggestions to fix this, or let me know if you think that this is a fatal error and I should try the WSL approach instead. Thank you so much!

[dcisbusy]

Hi David - little update from me. I haven't managed to get this working, but I have found a workaround that does a good enough job for my needs - simply loading the wiki in a node.js server and then bulk renaming all the .tid files into .md files. It's not perfect because it keeps all the meta data in the file, but it does the job! Thank you for your help!

[davidag]

Great, no problem.

The error is probably a bug in my Makefile related to whitespaces, adding some quotes somewhere would probably fix it. I could take a look in a Windows PC if your solution doesn't finally work out.