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Comment by gexla | Hacker News Reader

The title is click bait. It seems all note taking applications now need to be Roam Research alternatives. And then you get the entourage of other mentions (Hi, Obsidian.)

The Readme for the linked repo mentions this note taking system was inspired by Roam Research. That doesn't mean it's a Roam Research alternative.

Personally, I like VSC but I find it quickly gets cluttered and I'm trying to pare back the things I use it for.

I also often find myself struggling with the VSC UI for file handling. I don't know why. I often find myself opening another editor / file manager to use along with VSC. It seems error prone to me.

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It implements Roam-style syntax, backlinks and graph view, in what way is it not a Roam alternative?

* Quick entry in a workflowy-like interface (blocks) * Bidirectional links * Block linking * No need for file creation / management

Roam is just getting started with a dedicated team and a sustainable business model. At this point, I'm guessing they have built a lot of runway for development even if they lose a lot of users from their pricing.

Development with a dedicated team will move quicker than open source efforts. In this context, we're talking about a "Roam alternative" because the alternative is implementing ideas from Roam. Unless the team is all out of ideas, the future of alternatives will be to continue copying Roam.

The graph seems to be one of the least useful features. It doesn't take long before it becomes useless.

And the competition will check the pricing. Roam is the only block game in town, for now.

But are the backlinks created automatically? In Roam, yes, in Foam, I yet to have figure how.

Also, core feature in Roam is its Search box. I also don't see that in Foam.

Yes, backlinks are created automatically in Foam. See this page of the docs about opening the Backlinks Explorer pane: https://foambubble.github.io/foam/backlinking

To search, I think you can use VS Code’s built-in project-wide file contents search (⌘⇧F) or filename fuzzy matching (⌘P).

Same here. I keep using VS Code for dev only and Sublime Text for all other text editing tasks.

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