Ubuntu Productivity

The moment Yojimbo was released I grabbed a copy. I have used it daily ever since. Yojimbo is a very nice tool for quickly collecting bits of textual data in a searchable, taggable, and secure manner. But it has its limitations. Most notably—it only runs on Mac OS X. But it also suffers from a lack of export features

As I have move my life over to linux (and open source software in general) I have been in search of a suitable alternative. My favorite, thus far, has been the simple Tiddlywiki. Incollector is a close runner up, but it fails the cross-platform test (it only runs on Windows and Linux, not the Mac OS.)

When I first discovered Incollector I wrote this AppleScript to export my entire Yojimbo library into Incollectors xml format. In this way I am able to import my entire Yojimbo library (less pdfs) into Incollector.

But that was not enough, so I tweaked it to export my Yojimbo library to a Tiddlywiki. Anyone interested can grab the script here.

It is by no means perfect, but it gets the job done. The AppleScript copies the exported data to your clipboard. After running the script you must paste the resulting data into a new text file. Simply open up TextEdit and create a new plain text document and paste the data into it. Save it as a fresh new html Tiddlywiki file. Presto, you now have all your Yojimbo bookmarks, webarchives, passwords, notes, and serial numbers in a Tiddlywiki

If you would like your Yojimbo data to be part of a pre-existing Tiddlywiki then you can import its tiddlers like so:

1. Open the Tiddlywiki you want to import into
2. Go to backstage->import
3. Select the Tiddlywiki that you saved earlier, containing your Yojimbo exports
4. Choose all the tiddlers that you wish to import
5. Click “done” at the bottom when it completes

The usual caveats apply. I have only tested this on my computer running Leopard and Yojimbo 1.5.1, so there are no guarantees it will work on your system. The AppleScript will save all secured Yojimbo data as plain text (i.e. unsecured.) If you wish to hide your secure data then comment out the appropriate lines of the AppleScript (see comments in the script for instructions.)

I use TrueCrypt, running on a flash drive, to securely access my Yojimbo Tiddlywiki from any computer, be it Mac, Windows, or Linux.

Download the Yojimbo to Tiddlywiki AppleScript.