This actually looks very interesting! I have been trying to get all of my immediate family to coordinate on a shared google document to try and capture a lot of our family history, but the unstructured nature of memory snippets and anecdotes is challenging to organize coherently.
For example, I want to be able to easily capture the fact that we owned a dog. Oh wait, but what about all the other dogs we owned over the years? What about the time I got bit and had to get stitches? what about the other times I had to get stitches? What about the times that other family members got stitches? I find that memories oftentimes don't bubble to the surface until they are sparked by other memories.
I want to be able to easily organize everything in a connected graph, but also still map it to a timeline.
I'm definitely going to have to give Roam a try. I wonder how well it works when it comes to collaboration between different people?
IMO "easy" linking to other pages should be doable, but part of Roam's power is creating those pages by just making the link.
The linked references block I think could be extremely powerful in Notion. Bidirectional linking helps to associate data better than anything else I know, and if that can be handled semi-automatically it would blow people's minds.
Also, yeah, opening other pages in a sidebar would be amazing for being able to reference data without context switching and literally losing sight of what you're working on.
Personally, I'm using Notion for structured data, and Roam for unstructured, freely associated data. They're both pretty awesome in their own ways.
> Also, yeah, opening other pages in a sidebar would be amazing for being able to reference data without context switching and literally losing sight of what you're working on.
Can't you already do this? For example, if you right click on a title of a page, you get an option for "open in side bar." Then if you navigate to another page in the main pane, the sidebar still stays at the page you opened there.
Not exactly. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in MediaWiki (and others), you need to click the link, (optionally) type some text, and hit "Save" or the page doesn't actually exist yet.
With Roam, the page is automatically just there when it's mentioned. A subtle difference but I'm finding it quite useful.
Trusting my "personal knowledge" to a proprietary tool seems like a fundamentally bad idea to me, and no amount of clever features is going to fix that.
I believe the founder mentioned that they will eventually allow you to encrypt your data.
If you do any sort of public writing, you could use it for your writing process since that info would be private eventually anyways. Or you could expand that idea and include anything which you would be okay with being public.
For example, I may not have a reason to share a snippet from an article, but I wouldn't be bothered if it became public. I may also not be bothered if notes on that snippet were shared. And maybe if I did some writing for myself for understanding a subject, then that might be fine as well.
Not if there's no other app which doesn't have the same functionality. I would rather get the power of the app now and then lose that power in 5 years rather than disregard it completely. If the work I did in the app provides an ROI today, then I'm willing to face the possibility of the app evaporating.
I'd like to add to this that since the app lets you export your content, even if/when Roam dies, it would still be possible to move the data to another app somewhat easily.
Usually these end with an "Our Incredible Journey" post[0] and 14 days to back up your data, with the site half-broken during that time and nobody manning the support. I'd set up a script to keep your data backed up if the notes are important, or pray you're not on vacation when they get acquired.
> I believe the founder mentioned that they will eventually allow you to encrypt your data.
Well, as soon as the encryption comes this product will be usable. Giving my personal data to a non open source note taking project without any encryption capabilities is a big no.
If it were me... I'd probably have the data stored in a postgres db, maybe use graphql+elasticsearch indexes to provide the linking and searching... then the user could simply supply aws creds and what not to their own instances and basically host their own data that way. UI/UX still would be proprietary but that data fully owned by user.
Unfortunately, I tend to agree. I was pretty excited skimming over the post, not realizing this was a hosted solution. Any good self-hosted alternatives with the same features? Or good thread about personnal knowledge management?
Neither have full feature set, or work collaboratively, but nvalt in particular gives a good 80/20.
We export to plaintext markdown that reads well in either, planning export to org mode with enough data for a good elisp hacker to build parity of main features -- will do sooner if we know there are takers for that.
Have seen cool analysis of JSON export in Wolfram Alpha.
Nobody in their right mind should put anything they can't afford to lose in your service until this clause is adjusted to include some kind of export: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22105480
I keep falling into the occasional "I need a note-taking / todo app" rabbit hole, and there is a lot of people / companies re-inventing the wheel, but all of them nowadays seem Electron apps with proprietary cloud storage.
I should go back to a folder of .md files and todo.txt (http://todotxt.org/). Right now I'm using Evernote and Todoist but both of them ship my data off to the cloud - and I have no clue how secure it is. And sure I could do my due diligence but the companies are neither required to, and/or forbidden to reveal who has access to the data.
So do lots of other apps. You can link between files. Even just plain markdown would allow you to link between files. You could just include a build step and edit MD files and read HTML.
But ROAM also allows you to reference sections. Links you create leave references at the bottom to show you which sections link to this particular page or section. That gets to be a slog with plain text.
Other than the interface (which is a big "other than"), I'm trying and failing to see how this differs from a managed MediaWiki. Even most of the syntax appears to be similar.
MW would also solve some of the complaints about a lack of mobile support (MW has mobile skins), APIs (MW's is robust, for better and worse), scaling, and aliases (redirects).
Bi-directional links are visible if you go to the What Links Here [0] section of a page. Notably though it doesn't include "unlinked references" (as Roam refers to it), which is quite useful.
You can still fish that up if you need to either from the UI's search or the search API, but in poking Roam that felt like a potential anti-feature around ambiguous terms, for instance with no clear way to flag a particular reference as not relevant to a term.
OK. I have. I do still think this. The interface differences — which I acknowledge, and are significant, and maybe that's worth the switch — haven't landed that way for me yet. But I just do not see any differences in functionality, and I'd have to give up _a lot_ to get the interface.
The live-edit interface is double-edged. It's a split-second more convenient to edit but easier to make mistakes and harder to revert anything more than a typo. Every time I miss a TODO I end up editing the TODO instead and breaking it.
There's nothing in here that's appreciably better than MW's raw editor. I can't enable multi-cursor editing in Roam, and I doubt it would ever be an option across nodes/list items.
If I run the window vertically (or especially push to 1/3 screen width) I lose all value from the right sidebar.
There seems to be a lot of functionality tucked into right-click menus that are inconsistent, _extremely_ context-sensitive, and in some cases require considerable dexterity that I don't have. (Right click the _bullet_ for formatting?) Why aren't they keyboard shortcuts for these functions?
Block editing and versioning are neat, but less powerful than MW templates — again, a feature for me, probably not for the target audience? It's easy to create new versions in blocks — too easy, because how do I remove one I've added by accident? Are whole pages versioned?
The inline reverse mentions/backlinks are nice, though I don't know what they're good for yet. I already easily take advantage of backlinks in MW without needing them cluttering the inline content, and I can already sketch out how to add them in MW using its API if I can better grok the value of surfacing them. Otherwise they're already — at most — a click and keyboard shortcut away.
Surfacing full-text search results in the live search bar drags the interface down immensely, and isn't what I want out of that bar _at all_. That's the only thing I can see that's net negative. Browser lag on the third letter of a four-letter word was measurable in seconds — just chill out and let me enter the word.
The on-page context filters are neat. That's a feature that would legit take some work to implement in MW.
Bottom line, if the hook is "embeddable backlinked content in a lightweight editor", I get that in a non-VisualEditor MediaWiki install, plus a superior text editor and an API. And the API — again, to me, acknowledging that if I don't see the value Roam adds to that model, then I guess I'm not the audience — is still by itself a total dealbreaker even before I get to not being _able_ to self-host, not seeing the backup/restore story, not having any offline editing options, and not having a useful mobile editing story.
question for anyone who may be interested - what would it take to implement those workflows with backlinks in MediaWiki - or is it just outright impossible due to current data structures used.
For Windows users who prefer native apps and control over their data, Connected Text (paid, closed source ultimate kitchen sink with 30 days trial)[1] and WikiPad (free, open-source wiki engine)[2] are good alternatives to Roam.
Personally, I use TreeSheets [3] for note-taking and try to organize them as nodes in yEd [4] when I want to gain insight, but that quickly grows out of control and becomes unmanageable. Auto-linking and graph overview are extremely powerful features in this regard, but my gripe with e.g. Roam's approach (judging by screenshots) is that you can't visually filter out all the nodes at ones and "walk" the paths in a filtered graph -- that's why I consider switching from yEd to VUE [5], which has more decent filtering/search/layering/grouping options.
In general, [6] and [7] have good coverage of existing note-taking and mind-mapping tools.
Does Roam have any data export options though? If so, I might give it a try.
This looks awesome! I've been wanting a personal knowledge store for a long time. Between bookmarks, random notes and lists that I throw away, cool quotes I find, and even thoughts that I ponder and get distracted from, I feel like there's so much interesting stuff I've found that remains inaccessible or was lost or is just laying around uncatalogued. It's just that all the usual data-cataloging systems seem so clunky or have a whole "system" that intrusively proscribes how to use it.
Roam looks like a pretty interesting solution to this problem. Simple but capable flat document system, especially the very nice tagging with automatic bidirectional linking to organize everything with. Pretty UI, maybe a little more customized than my tastes, but still nice to interact with.
My only reservation is the reason why I haven't tried any of the other big proprietary solutions: I really don't want to switch away once I'm on it, and I don't want to ever worry about losing access to it. I.e. I'll want to self host it. Don't get me wrong, I would still be quite willing to pay for such an app, but I also need it to be open-sourced and have a simple open data model.
This was very interesting for me to read. I am a heavy user of Notion and recently documented my own knowledge management practices [1].
I understand some of the Notion criticism, but I think you can get around most of it. Instead of relying on the tree structure, I organize pretty much everything in databases, which can have relations to each other. This way, you can have bidirectional linking and the user experience for creating these links is very good.
No, it is completely different experience to do that in Notion and (have it automated) in Roam. I was heavy Notion and Dynalist user, now I'm completely sold to Roam. Try it for a month with some hobby project and to log your daily life, it's crazy good, after few weeks of use I'm still in awe and I find new, better workflows every week.
I will leave the argument which one is better for the marketing people of the respective companies. My post covers also other tools that I use, such as GitLab and Workona.
Just wanted to point out that Notion is very versatile and that there are ways to achieve bidirectional linking.
> I was heavy Notion and Dynalist user, now I'm completely sold to Roam.
What scares me about this comment is that, in there lies the possibility of a better notes app coming along, and having to deal with porting the data from one place to another.
I've jumped around between a whole bunch of different note-taking apps and methods (Markdown notes in vim or ST3, Evernote, Keep, gdocs, Nuclino, etc.) and have mostly settled on Bullet Journalling. The act of writing itself is helpful for memorization, threading and indexes helps with information location, and the mobile app lets you take pictures of your notes and link them to others (across notebooks, etc.).
I am tempted to try Roam regardless because of tagging, but the lack of some way to sync with my more important physical notes kind of turns me off of the effort, as minor and specific as it is.
He doesn't seem to understand tags and links in evernote. Evernote can absolutely be structured as a flat graph in the way that he describes as a big benefit of Roam.
That said, as a long-term evernote user, I've been wanting to leave for a while and move to an OSS/self-hosted solution. It might be joplin but my few attempts to use it I haven't yet had enough time to evaluate whether it would be a viable long-term solution.
Edit: I'm also seriously considering just using https://github.com/Alok/notational-fzf-vim and only doing note-taking on my laptop (not on mobile). It's extremely fast and basically zero friction. This would have a slight downside in that I quite often want to consume notes on the go so I may need to find an option there (eg serve my notes up using a private server or something).
This is definitely a problem I run into. I’m having a team meeting about Project X, and someone mentions that a particular task is waiting for something from Project Y.
The only way I’ve found to handle this is manual. Note the dependency in the meeting notes, then process the notes after the meeting creating relevant todos elsewhere. But that’s only maintainable if you don’t have a lot of work on at the same time, or a lot of dependencies - and we find ourselves back at lean.
Too much work is too much work, and no amount of automation is going to fix that. Furthermore, life is messy, and there is no universal way of structuring that mess. The more mess there is, the harder it will be to live with it. So reduce the mess to the point you can live with it, rather than trying to structure it.
I don't use files, I use tags. I have 2 notebooks to differentiate notes that I want synced to my mobile devices, but really that's not needed.
You can tag any note with multiple tags and then use saved filters to always find notes which are in a given tag. All of this used to work a lot better (evernote search has been getting consistently worse) but it still works fine.
You can use multiple tags, but the granularity is still page level. To continue on Conor's example, you'd have, say, a note for your whole meeting, with 3 sections for each agenda point. And you'd have 3 tags.
But then when you want to see information pertaining to a given tag, it means that the content on that meeting note is 66% irrelevant. That doesn't happen in Roam.
But in the current state of the app sharing a note shares your entire DB, its an awesome tool but I'm unable to find a way to create a secondary DB without creating a new account.
For one, taskwiki, which if you use task means you have a great way to bang a checkbox in a vimwiki file and have that create a task.
MY company uses outlook so I sync the outlook calendar to khal using vdirsyncer. I then can use a (really janky) vimscript function of my own devising to add the calendar and some standard stuff to a "daily note". So I go <leader>ww and it creates a note for the day and adds my calendar and then I use that for all the basic notes for the day.
vimoutliner for when I absolutely want an actual outliner to do some planning. It's not always the right tool, but when it is, it's great, and it integrates perfectly with fzf. The other thing is that because notational-fzf is just doing a fuzzy find over text, I point it at all my sourcecode dirs for immediate jumping to particular files, functions etc in sourcecode.
No I do, they just don't offer this same level of functionality. Try the tagging system in Roam for a few hours and you'll see the difference, Evernote's tag setup is much clunkier and harder to do on-the-fly.
I’m intrigued by Roam, but I can’t see myself using it as long as it’s browser & cloud only. Also, good typography and visual design is critical in any kind of note taking app, but in Roam that barely feels like an afterthought.
Something like this but as a plain text based, native Mac/iOS app with stellar typography... that would be a dream.
Ditto. I was actually thinking of trying Roam until I read there was no mobile app. I like the idea of a “second brain”, but for me that has to be something that never gets detached from my first brain. It has to be accessible at all times, for both reading and writing. I currently make do with Apple Notes, but I’m interested in finding something more organized…
A second brain should also be as private as my first brain – ideally end-to-end encrypted, which I guess Roam is not if it’s a webapp. Too bad. (Apple Notes isn’t end-to-end encrypted either, but that’s another reason I’m looking for an upgrade.)
Even though it's a webapp it can be end-to-end encrypted. Fortunately, they are planning to do it, but I am not 100% convinced that all the function will work on e2e notes.
Dynalist offers free account and works offline on all platforms, and was the inspiration for Roam, one can also try that for that temporary holding spot.
Seconded and I'm glad I saw this before I got too deep into it. I'm wary to try even something totally open source because of course their is the adoption cost (do you move all of your old notes over? do you have a split brain? Too much waste time in tiddlywiki for me is a harsh lesson).
That said, I still appreciate the effort people spend in thinking about these things, but a cloud-only offering (cloud-only and 3rd-party hosted, I should emphasize) is sadly not for me.
I earned $5000 ultimate month by using operating online only for 5 to 8 hours on my computer and this was so smooth that i personally couldn't accept as true with before working on this website. if you too need to earn this sort of huge cash then come and be part of us. do this internet-website online ...........
At first glance it looks somewhat like MediaWiki (the wiki software behind Wikipedia), which also supports creating pages implicitly by linking to them. The markup style also looks similar. Does anybody know how it compares? The MediaWiki interface looks clunkier and you probably will need extensions for some of the stuff Roam does (e.g. like Semantic MediaWiki).
This has me really intrigued and I've been on to workflowy and a smattering of org-mode for over a decade now. Consistency is more important to me than optimality and workflowy has served me well for that. Reading on interestedly ..
This clause from the privacy policy is not very encouraging:
> We may terminate or suspend your account and bar access to the Service immediately, without prior notice or liability, under our sole discretion, for any reason whatsoever and without limitation, including but not limited to a breach of the Terms.
I think that's a lost battle now -- the Terms of Use / Privacy Policy of pretty much every online service, important or otherwise, says the same thing. For example, from HN's own terms of use:
> You agree that Y Combinator, in its sole discretion, may suspend or terminate your account (or any part thereof) or use of the Site and remove and discard any content within the Site, for any reason, including, without limitation, for lack of use or if Y Combinator believes that you have violated or acted inconsistently with the letter or spirit of these Terms of Use.
Sure, and Github might hold your life's code, but they state exactly the same thing.
> 3. GitHub May Terminate
> GitHub has the right to suspend or terminate your access to all or any part of the Website at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately. GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time.
I think literally every online service has this sort of clause, and in the absence of language explicitly stating the contrary, a cautious approach would be to assume they mean exactly this. Pragmatically speaking, you should have a local backup of everything you've placed online.
It's not perfect, but you can export your entire database in Markdown format at any time. So given regular backups, this wouldn't be an absolute catastrophe.
Actually going to look into this - given up on Evernote, don't like Apple Notes and Bear writer just didn't click....but did anyone else get put off by the whole "casually going to show off my notes on Prepping and Bugging Out as they're totally normal and chill things to be across". Undermines the credibility of the writer.
I thought it added to the credibility as it positioned them in my mind as a longer term thinker than myself.
By the way, I’ve been bouncing between bear and Ulysses and I’ve decided that I just love the Bear experience more than any other editor. There’s something really elegant about it....
From privacy policy - "As a condition of your use of the Service, you grant Roam a nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide, transferable, sub-licenseable license to access, use, host, cache, store, reproduce, transmit, display, publish, distribute, modify and adapt and create derivative works (either alone or as part of a collective work) from your public Content."
So "public content" on Roam is considered essentially "public domain content"?
They demand an irrevocable worldwide license, with the ability to transfer the license and to sublicense according to to the text in the post you're replying to.
That is standard legal boilerplate that allows them to host/display content that you mark as public. All sites that share user generated content publicly have similar clauses.
I think "adaptation and derivative works" could apply even for simple format conversion like Markdown (what you authored) to HTML (what you see) or even image thumbnails of pages (?)
Medium's policy doesn't seem to ask for rights to create derivative works and such. I found the verbage unnecessarily broad for what i know is likely to be narrowly applied. If RoamResearch decides to declare that all public content on Roam is relicensed under public domain tomorrow, that would seem within the scope of the policy as stated, though perhaps not within the scope of applicable law.
edit: I see that notion.so also has the same wording.
A very interesting read, but I can't shake the feeling that Roam is "just" a better wiki. Which is probably all that is needed to have a product that works, sometimes the littlest changes make for the best tool. Another wiki that is pretty interesting is https://tiddlywiki.com/, although Roam seems to have a easier to use interface.
Founder mentions on twitter pricing tbd though hopefully this year, considering $30/mo with a discounted annual plan. Discounts/scholarships for students, non-profits, and low income. Also mentions a $10k lifetime plan with a potential “code escrow” should they cease to operate (though acknowledges not expecting to get many of those—mentions expecting 10, ever).
$30/mo seems insanely expensive for a note taking app. I guess I'll stick to the local vscode on top of a notes directory that takes advantage of local access and indexing and runs on a synced folder.
It's insanely expensive if you are comparing the price and functionality to existing apps. I would expect a "me too" app to have "me too" pricing.
The reason people are talking about Roam is because it's not like other note taking apps. People who use the app will need to extract a break-even $30 / month worth of ROI just like you might from any other piece of equipment or tool which extends your capabilities.
I find Roam compelling enough that I believe I can reach that point. If I'm not reaching that point, then I need to adjust my efforts.
I feel pricing shouldn't be a sticking point. I try to keep my consumption to a bare minimum, so that my focus is on high value activities. If the tooling can't return the investment, then that activity and the related tools aren't for me. It's not that the tooling is bad, it's just that my efforts are best pointed elsewhere.
I believe the founders operate on this idea and it's refreshing. Yes, it will be expensive for many. Potential users will walk based on the pricing. And I wish more developers would be willing to create something different and charge proper pricing for the effort.
Despite what the article claims, I really don't see much new in what Roam does over any other note taking app or wiki. --Whether they have more or less structure, they all let you link pages together, so hierarchies are generally up to you to decide if you want more or less of.
I use OneNote since I already have O365 anyway. To convince me that I should pay more than 3 times what O365 costs, you'd have to be able to show amazing improvements, and Roam just doesn't.
Seems similar to Mindforger ... Mindforger I think uses ai or something to 'link' internally between docs. Just found it the other day, but it's free. so -- I'll probably stick w/ that.
> I believe the founders operate on this idea and it's refreshing.
Many founders do, and that's why they price themselves out of the market. That's simply not how people make purchase decisions. There are many, many products out there that are "worth more" than the price. If you think you can charge $30/month for a product because your customers will get $31/month worth of value from it, you won't have many customers.
I understand people being disappointed with the numbers you quote, which I agree seem very steep, but I have no idea why they downvote you, for providing the seemingly best answer (currently) available to GPs issue.
It seems that right now it's considered beta, so all accounts are free trials.
I can't tell where "Roam Research" is based, or if it's even an actual company or just some developers using the name. There's no terms of service beyond their privacy policy, which doesn't list what jurisdiction they claim to be under.
I definitely wouldn't risk using the service based on the lack of information they provide.
It's crazy to me that someone could have so many notes that they need to do all this tagging just to be able to find them. After 2000+ notes in Apple notes I've learned that the notes I go back to most often are nonfiction book notes and certain periodically updated lists, and any other notes I just find through the search bar.
I've been using TheBrain for a couple weeks now and I have to say, being able to visualize my knowledge as a literal graph has ruined other note taking apps for me.
I now use it for everything from tasks to reading notes and then all the normal knowledge I get from browsing the internet. I put most articles I read in it and attach notes to them and then I can just browse through my graph and refresh my memory on stuff really fast.
Maybe I am from a different time but I simply cannot imagine entrusting my private thoughts and knowledge to a cloud service ( aka someone else’s computer) without end to end encryption.
I personally think it depends—there are multiple levels of knowledge that you can store in a notes app. I personally would love something that could store my lecture notes and provide me the freedom to take them any way I want to.
I wouldn't care if a company had access to those things. But yeah, definitely not personal data.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadFor example, I want to be able to easily capture the fact that we owned a dog. Oh wait, but what about all the other dogs we owned over the years? What about the time I got bit and had to get stitches? what about the other times I had to get stitches? What about the times that other family members got stitches? I find that memories oftentimes don't bubble to the surface until they are sparked by other memories.
I want to be able to easily organize everything in a connected graph, but also still map it to a timeline.
I'm definitely going to have to give Roam a try. I wonder how well it works when it comes to collaboration between different people?
The linked references block I think could be extremely powerful in Notion. Bidirectional linking helps to associate data better than anything else I know, and if that can be handled semi-automatically it would blow people's minds.
Also, yeah, opening other pages in a sidebar would be amazing for being able to reference data without context switching and literally losing sight of what you're working on.
Personally, I'm using Notion for structured data, and Roam for unstructured, freely associated data. They're both pretty awesome in their own ways.
Can't you already do this? For example, if you right click on a title of a page, you get an option for "open in side bar." Then if you navigate to another page in the main pane, the sidebar still stays at the page you opened there.
This is exactly how MediaWiki (and clones) have been doing it for years.
With Roam, the page is automatically just there when it's mentioned. A subtle difference but I'm finding it quite useful.
If you do any sort of public writing, you could use it for your writing process since that info would be private eventually anyways. Or you could expand that idea and include anything which you would be okay with being public.
For example, I may not have a reason to share a snippet from an article, but I wouldn't be bothered if it became public. I may also not be bothered if notes on that snippet were shared. And maybe if I did some writing for myself for understanding a subject, then that might be fine as well.
That's pretty much how I use the app.
[0] https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com
Well, as soon as the encryption comes this product will be usable. Giving my personal data to a non open source note taking project without any encryption capabilities is a big no.
Best self hosted tools are Org-mode and nValt.
Neither have full feature set, or work collaboratively, but nvalt in particular gives a good 80/20.
We export to plaintext markdown that reads well in either, planning export to org mode with enough data for a good elisp hacker to build parity of main features -- will do sooner if we know there are takers for that.
Have seen cool analysis of JSON export in Wolfram Alpha.
I should go back to a folder of .md files and todo.txt (http://todotxt.org/). Right now I'm using Evernote and Todoist but both of them ship my data off to the cloud - and I have no clue how secure it is. And sure I could do my due diligence but the companies are neither required to, and/or forbidden to reveal who has access to the data.
Lots of self hosted options that are much better than evernote or todoist. Org mode for one.
Worth learning emacs for that.
But ROAM also allows you to reference sections. Links you create leave references at the bottom to show you which sections link to this particular page or section. That gets to be a slog with plain text.
MW would also solve some of the complaints about a lack of mobile support (MW has mobile skins), APIs (MW's is robust, for better and worse), scaling, and aliases (redirects).
[0]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:What_links_here
Pages as filterable collections of backlinks from blocks.
A datalog engine for structured data via attributes.
Collaborative real time editing.
But you're mostly right - UX that comes from that is the thing that matters.
The live-edit interface is double-edged. It's a split-second more convenient to edit but easier to make mistakes and harder to revert anything more than a typo. Every time I miss a TODO I end up editing the TODO instead and breaking it.
There's nothing in here that's appreciably better than MW's raw editor. I can't enable multi-cursor editing in Roam, and I doubt it would ever be an option across nodes/list items.
If I run the window vertically (or especially push to 1/3 screen width) I lose all value from the right sidebar.
There seems to be a lot of functionality tucked into right-click menus that are inconsistent, _extremely_ context-sensitive, and in some cases require considerable dexterity that I don't have. (Right click the _bullet_ for formatting?) Why aren't they keyboard shortcuts for these functions?
Block editing and versioning are neat, but less powerful than MW templates — again, a feature for me, probably not for the target audience? It's easy to create new versions in blocks — too easy, because how do I remove one I've added by accident? Are whole pages versioned?
The inline reverse mentions/backlinks are nice, though I don't know what they're good for yet. I already easily take advantage of backlinks in MW without needing them cluttering the inline content, and I can already sketch out how to add them in MW using its API if I can better grok the value of surfacing them. Otherwise they're already — at most — a click and keyboard shortcut away.
Surfacing full-text search results in the live search bar drags the interface down immensely, and isn't what I want out of that bar _at all_. That's the only thing I can see that's net negative. Browser lag on the third letter of a four-letter word was measurable in seconds — just chill out and let me enter the word.
The on-page context filters are neat. That's a feature that would legit take some work to implement in MW.
Bottom line, if the hook is "embeddable backlinked content in a lightweight editor", I get that in a non-VisualEditor MediaWiki install, plus a superior text editor and an API. And the API — again, to me, acknowledging that if I don't see the value Roam adds to that model, then I guess I'm not the audience — is still by itself a total dealbreaker even before I get to not being _able_ to self-host, not seeing the backup/restore story, not having any offline editing options, and not having a useful mobile editing story.
Most of benefit is in the new workflows you get via backlinks.
You told them to try it. They did, and wrote up feedback. Your reply, after you told them to do it, is dismissive.
A good deal of the feedback remains applicable even if you’re ‘sold’ on the benefit.
There's also ongoing experimental work toward making the parser's backlinks support more usable.[2]
[1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Backlinks
[2]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AdvancedBacklinks
Personally, I use TreeSheets [3] for note-taking and try to organize them as nodes in yEd [4] when I want to gain insight, but that quickly grows out of control and becomes unmanageable. Auto-linking and graph overview are extremely powerful features in this regard, but my gripe with e.g. Roam's approach (judging by screenshots) is that you can't visually filter out all the nodes at ones and "walk" the paths in a filtered graph -- that's why I consider switching from yEd to VUE [5], which has more decent filtering/search/layering/grouping options.
In general, [6] and [7] have good coverage of existing note-taking and mind-mapping tools.
Does Roam have any data export options though? If so, I might give it a try.
[1]: http://www.connectedtext.com/
[2]: http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/
[3]: http://strlen.com/treesheets/
[4]: https://www.yworks.com/products/yed
[5]: http://vue.tufts.edu/index.cfm
[6]: https://pauljmiller.wordpress.com/category/software/note-tak...
[7]: https://pauljmiller.wordpress.com/category/software/mind-map...
We export to markdown and JSON.
Roam looks like a pretty interesting solution to this problem. Simple but capable flat document system, especially the very nice tagging with automatic bidirectional linking to organize everything with. Pretty UI, maybe a little more customized than my tastes, but still nice to interact with.
My only reservation is the reason why I haven't tried any of the other big proprietary solutions: I really don't want to switch away once I'm on it, and I don't want to ever worry about losing access to it. I.e. I'll want to self host it. Don't get me wrong, I would still be quite willing to pay for such an app, but I also need it to be open-sourced and have a simple open data model.
To that end, it seems like this UI on top of Perkeep's API https://perkeep.org/doc/overview might be pretty nice combination.
I understand some of the Notion criticism, but I think you can get around most of it. Instead of relying on the tree structure, I organize pretty much everything in databases, which can have relations to each other. This way, you can have bidirectional linking and the user experience for creating these links is very good.
[1] https://tkainrad.dev/posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-ba...
Just wanted to point out that Notion is very versatile and that there are ways to achieve bidirectional linking.
What scares me about this comment is that, in there lies the possibility of a better notes app coming along, and having to deal with porting the data from one place to another.
I am tempted to try Roam regardless because of tagging, but the lack of some way to sync with my more important physical notes kind of turns me off of the effort, as minor and specific as it is.
That said, as a long-term evernote user, I've been wanting to leave for a while and move to an OSS/self-hosted solution. It might be joplin but my few attempts to use it I haven't yet had enough time to evaluate whether it would be a viable long-term solution.
Edit: I'm also seriously considering just using https://github.com/Alok/notational-fzf-vim and only doing note-taking on my laptop (not on mobile). It's extremely fast and basically zero friction. This would have a slight downside in that I quite often want to consume notes on the go so I may need to find an option there (eg serve my notes up using a private server or something).
In a meeting with 4 people, discussing three big ideas, related to two projects, what file do you put the note in?
In Roam that's not even a question you have to ask, all info in each paragraph goes to all the right places
The only way I’ve found to handle this is manual. Note the dependency in the meeting notes, then process the notes after the meeting creating relevant todos elsewhere. But that’s only maintainable if you don’t have a lot of work on at the same time, or a lot of dependencies - and we find ourselves back at lean.
Too much work is too much work, and no amount of automation is going to fix that. Furthermore, life is messy, and there is no universal way of structuring that mess. The more mess there is, the harder it will be to live with it. So reduce the mess to the point you can live with it, rather than trying to structure it.
You can tag any note with multiple tags and then use saved filters to always find notes which are in a given tag. All of this used to work a lot better (evernote search has been getting consistently worse) but it still works fine.
But then when you want to see information pertaining to a given tag, it means that the content on that meeting note is 66% irrelevant. That doesn't happen in Roam.
Been working on both this week.
MY company uses outlook so I sync the outlook calendar to khal using vdirsyncer. I then can use a (really janky) vimscript function of my own devising to add the calendar and some standard stuff to a "daily note". So I go <leader>ww and it creates a note for the day and adds my calendar and then I use that for all the basic notes for the day.
vimoutliner for when I absolutely want an actual outliner to do some planning. It's not always the right tool, but when it is, it's great, and it integrates perfectly with fzf. The other thing is that because notational-fzf is just doing a fuzzy find over text, I point it at all my sourcecode dirs for immediate jumping to particular files, functions etc in sourcecode.
Something like this but as a plain text based, native Mac/iOS app with stellar typography... that would be a dream.
A second brain should also be as private as my first brain – ideally end-to-end encrypted, which I guess Roam is not if it’s a webapp. Too bad. (Apple Notes isn’t end-to-end encrypted either, but that’s another reason I’m looking for an upgrade.)
The org-mode fanatics may disagree with this
I've been using Drafts as a temporary holding spot for things to add to Roam when I'm on the go.
That said, I still appreciate the effort people spend in thinking about these things, but a cloud-only offering (cloud-only and 3rd-party hosted, I should emphasize) is sadly not for me.
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Also see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107783
This might be okay for a free of charge toy, but not for anything that matters at all.
By the way, I’ve been bouncing between bear and Ulysses and I’ve decided that I just love the Bear experience more than any other editor. There’s something really elegant about it....
So "public content" on Roam is considered essentially "public domain content"?
It's a common problem with legalese. Even straightforward things sound scary without a lot of additional text explaining everything.
edit: I see that notion.so also has the same wording.
Lack of easy collaborative option and the speed of organizing sets of intersecting sets of notes were some of main reasons I needed something else.
Could you please be more specific ? I'm curious about what this is exactly and how Roam solves it
The reason people are talking about Roam is because it's not like other note taking apps. People who use the app will need to extract a break-even $30 / month worth of ROI just like you might from any other piece of equipment or tool which extends your capabilities.
I find Roam compelling enough that I believe I can reach that point. If I'm not reaching that point, then I need to adjust my efforts.
I feel pricing shouldn't be a sticking point. I try to keep my consumption to a bare minimum, so that my focus is on high value activities. If the tooling can't return the investment, then that activity and the related tools aren't for me. It's not that the tooling is bad, it's just that my efforts are best pointed elsewhere.
I believe the founders operate on this idea and it's refreshing. Yes, it will be expensive for many. Potential users will walk based on the pricing. And I wish more developers would be willing to create something different and charge proper pricing for the effort.
I use OneNote since I already have O365 anyway. To convince me that I should pay more than 3 times what O365 costs, you'd have to be able to show amazing improvements, and Roam just doesn't.
Many founders do, and that's why they price themselves out of the market. That's simply not how people make purchase decisions. There are many, many products out there that are "worth more" than the price. If you think you can charge $30/month for a product because your customers will get $31/month worth of value from it, you won't have many customers.
I can't tell where "Roam Research" is based, or if it's even an actual company or just some developers using the name. There's no terms of service beyond their privacy policy, which doesn't list what jurisdiction they claim to be under.
I definitely wouldn't risk using the service based on the lack of information they provide.
I now use it for everything from tasks to reading notes and then all the normal knowledge I get from browsing the internet. I put most articles I read in it and attach notes to them and then I can just browse through my graph and refresh my memory on stuff really fast.
1. Is Roam text only? I haven't noticed any images in the examples I have seen so far.
2. What is its business model? I didn't see any pricing information.
2. The co-founder has said he's looking at charging $30 / month when it's ready.
https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1214867422496165888
I wouldn't care if a company had access to those things. But yeah, definitely not personal data.