Why Roam Is Cool
divinations.substack.com
divinations.substack.com
I have seen people praise Roam because of different features. Some say the ability to link concepts bidirectionally allows them to create the wiki they always wish they had, only now they can look at every single context where a topic has been mentioned. Others love the ability to use logic constructs to query chunks of text depending on their tags and content. For me personally, it's the ability to reference any fragment of the text so that it lives in multiple places at the same time. Hence, I can reuse ideas in different contexts. Alternatively, if I'm looking at a specific idea, I can tell where it's being drawn upon.
I have been using Roam every day for the last 2 months, and it has completely changed my note-taking habits. I have always strived to digitize all my thoughts, but for me, it never felt like I was fully engaged with my note-taking, Roam changed that. Because the main view is a daily page, it invites you to pour everything right there, relieving you of the duty of having to think if something's well placed under a hierarchy of folders. If you link your thoughts, then your thoughts will not get lost.
A cult is a cult when the members can't shut up about the cult and Roam is making a lot of noise right now.
I've seen Roam being mentioned as a graph database for notes before but your comment helps me see it! Would this be a good working model - each `note` entry is logged to a central table in something like a relational database and each `page` is a materialised view over that relation. In contrast, for most of the other note taking apps, the abstraction for a note seems closer to a file.
Would be fun to implement something that works locally with an embeddable graph database library.
No, it's not. Zettelkasten is just the german word for "Box of paper slips", a common tool for certain people. There are many famous Paperboxes from artists and scientist over the centuries, but the ojne responsable for this new zettelkasten-cargo-cult would be Luhmanns Zettelkasten.
Niklas Luhmann was a sociologist who had the habbit to gather notes to an excessiv level on paper slips and collect those in boxes. He was famous because he used common organizing-methods of scientist for notes, instead of just quotes, books and articles.
Some years ago serious research started about his notes, which are now all scaned and online available, and since then some kind of irrational cargo-cult around him has started.
- It's open, text-based, and thus data are portable, or at least easily readable, elsewhere.
- It's free, unencumbered by patents, so it can be re-implemented elsewhere.
- I personally can start using it immediately, and it will integrate into my workflow.
I can't believe that nobody has thought to build an application with bio-directional block linking like this. Every app I have used with links can link to a page. Fewer apps can link to a specific page. None of these give you much "at a glance" insight about what the thing is linking to without clicking the link.
I have thought about this and I have tried to build it, but I haven't had the time. Clearly time isn't an issue for the note building world though. Not taking apps are a dime a dozen. That's not to say that my app would have been Roam. I just wanted the functionality Roam brings to the table. I know I'm not alone from all the praise Roam gets. I'm just glad I didn't have to build the thing.
bi-directional linking is not new. It's a known idea with some implementation in wikis and other software. But it usually comes with certain problems, so implementation is hard and performance sucks. Maybe those problems are today less visable with better hardware and more battle-tested software.
> Every app I have used with links can link to a page. Fewer apps can link to a specific page.
What do you mean with specific page? A block/paragraph on the page?
"This is a free preview of a premium members-only post."
I looked through the features and this appears to be the same dime-a-dozen-me-too app which doesn't have the one feature everyone loves about Roam.
Cheers to the person who built this. I don't want to crap on anyone's work. But this isn't at all like Roam from what I can see.
BTW, if your intention is not to crap on anyone's work, maybe don't call something a dime-a-dozen app?
It’s simple, but lessens friction and I can jot anything down without having to think about organization.
I am also refining the "look back in time" feature to a global keyboard shortcut, to make it easier to flip through past journal entries, for example "open all the entries from last week," etc.
0. https://pastebin.com/nFpRzUbe in case it's helpful to anyone.
You can't read the whole thing and I regret starting to read it, only to be left mid-thought.