Discussion of Roam-like Knowledge Managers

Posted by Luhmann
Apr 15, 2020 at 09:41 AM

Roam is not simply an outliner with wiki links, what really makes it unique is the fact that links are bi-directional. You see what is linking to a document. This turns out to be very powerful. For instance, if I make a link for a contact, and then make a note about a meeting with that person, I will see the meeting listed under the contact entry, and the contact listed under the meeting entry. Moreover, it isn’t just a “backlink” but it shows the context of the link as well, which means you often don’t need to open the original document to read the relevant information, or even edit it. As far as I’m aware iA writer doesn’t do this.

This also means that tags aren’t just tags, but pages you can edit, linking to other related tags for instance, or providing more context explanation about the tag itself.

But Roam doesn’t just stop there. It also allows you to clone notes, and embed notes, so the same information can appear in multiple places and editing it in one place edits all the other instances.

And I haven’t even discussed its powerful query syntax that lets you embed not just linked notes or embedded notes, but also to produce your own complex queries to populate pages.

And there are many other features as well, such as versioning, todo, etc.

Yes, Obsidian still lacks much of this, but then I doubt it has been around for even a full month. I’m sure it will catch up quickly, and probably go off in its own direction the same way Dynalist departed from Workflowy…

By the way, it isn’t just Erica working on Obsidian, it is both of the Dynalist creators: Erica and Shida. Shida has just been less vocal.