I am really writing this just so someone who has this same problem maybe has a bit of an easier time searching for the answer. I am going to be a bit verbose with the idea that it will help that searchability.

I have a Tiddlywiki running the Node.js server. That’s TiddlyWiki5. I had always found it to be the case that my tiddlers saved as separate .md files, with metadata in a file with extension .md.meta. This was the intended behavior; I create tiddlers with the type text/x-markdown, and I had some automation depending on those .md files.

To my horror, I discovered that some of my automation wasn’t working because the files that were being created were actually .tid files. They had the equivalent lines of .md.meta in them and then the equivalent contents of the .md file, as is standard for this file type. Since this was not the behavior I was used to and since everything I could find suggested it shouldn’t be happening, I was at a loss.

Then I found the right Google Groups email.

if you use the server option, you need to make sure you update the generated tiddlywiki.info file with the plugins that are relevant to how files should be saved1.

That will look something like

"plugins": [
        "tiddlywiki/markdown"
]

All right, so now you fixed it but you still have a lot of .tid files you wish were .md files. How can you convert them? If you are using a computer that has a unixy terminal and you know a bit about how to use it….

This is what I used to convert the accidental markdown .tid files. It is not representative of my professional code and you should only run it after you’ve made a backup copy of your whole wiki folder and I provide no warranty and you’re lucky it has any comments at all.

I will also note that this leave blank lines above your markdown. I didn’t notice on the first pass and then wrote a separate awk dealio to handle it because I had a use case where it mattered. You could handle this by changing that header variable in the awk script to have three cases instead of two, yada yada, but I am only pasting this in to maybe be helpful to someone who doesn’t want to look up awk flags.

# the IFS nonsense is only necessary because I have filenames with spaces
OLD_IFS=${IFS}
IFS=$'\n'
PATH_TO_YOUR_WIKI= < here >
for blah in `find $PATH_TO_YOUR_WIKI/tiddlers/ | grep "tid$" | grep -v 'tiddlers\/\$_'` ; do # list out tiddlers, exclude system ones, yes I know I could have looked up find flags for the file extension, yes I know it could have been ls, leave me alone
  if grep "^type: .*markdown$" $blah  &>/dev/null ; then # you meant it to be markdown
    if ! grep -A1 "^type: .*markdown$" $blah  | tail -n+2 | grep '[^\s]' ; then # the line after the type declaration is blank; this seemed in the ones I spot checked to always be the end of the metadata but YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY
      BASE_PATH=`echo $blah | sed 's/.tid$//'`
      MD_PATH=`echo $BASE_PATH | sed 's/$/.md/'`
      HEADER_PATH=`echo $MD_PATH | sed 's/$/.meta/'`
      touch $MD_PATH $HEADER_PATH 
      awk -v "md=$MD_PATH" -v "hp=$HEADER_PATH" ' BEGIN { 
              print "" > md;
              print "" > hp;
              header=0
      }
      { if (header == 0) { print >> hp  }
        else { print >> md }
      if ( $0 ~ /type: .*markdown$/ ) {header=1}
       }
      ' $blah

      rm $blah

    fi
  fi
done 
IFS=${OLD_IFS}

Well, it is representative of my professional code in that my placeholder names for scripts have… uh… personality.

  1. The email chain claims that it’s necessary to add all the plugins you install there. I … hope this is not true, but that’s sort of beside the point. ↩