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Comment by roddds | Hacker News Reader

How is Dendron different from Foam[1]? At first glance, both projects are very similar.

foam is a note taking tool heavily modeled after roam research and backlinks. the core foam extension mainly focuses on stitching together third party extensions for most of its functionality.

dendron is also, in part, inspired by roam (backlinks, daily journals, etc) but is built around the notion of [hierarchical note taking](https://www.kevinslin.com/notes/3dd58f62-fee5-4f93-b9f1-b0f0...). dendron takes the structure provided by well built hierarchies and combines it with the freedom of roam's backlinks and block references.

while dendron also relies on third party extensions, the majority of functionality is inside the dendron extension. you can refactor notes via regex (dendron will update both backlinks and file names), lookup your notes via their path, apply schemas to categorize your notes, and much more.

I would be also interested in a more detailed comparison. Specially with foam and obsidian

One of Dendron's main innovations is how it handles note namespaces. While most apps with hierarchy separates titles linearly with folders for nesting, Dendron separates note titles among both an x and y axis, along with a nesting hierarchy. What results is a nicely organized navigation sidebar for choosing notes to open, as well as ease of naming new notes and adding on to existing notes.

Foam seems to be Obsidian ported to VSCode, minus several features and without a searchable graph view.

Not the author, but foam isn't hierarchical for one

Foam can be setup and run hierarchical. I use this setup for mine with broad groupings at the top (history, medicine, politics, etc) and then subgroups as needed (history -> pandemics, history -> wars, etc). You can use foam-doctor to regenerate paths and titles on a regular basis.

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