"Roam Research" -- New web-based personal wiki

Posted by SmallDog
Oct 27, 2019 at 04:37 AM

Wow, this is quite nice.

* renaming nodes automatically (and silently, unlike ConnectedText) updates all references (this really should be a basic wiki feature, yet so many apps don’t have it)
* search by typing [[ matches by ARBITRARY substring rather than initial substring (as is with CT’s [[ search)
* the export format is just one giant text file, ‘indented’ with asterisks. More intelligible IMO than the many small files approach
* global search is instant (i.e. filtering, no need to press a button) and very fast
* graph view is very nice. Hopefully they will (1) introduce automatic layout options in the future (as in yEd), and (2) introduce the ability when clicking on a node to ‘show neighborhood’ (as in TheBrain and yEd’s neighborhood view)
* no offline access though, which is something of a deal breaker for me. Hopefully they will introduce it in the future though

(Personally, since they have block-level tranclusion, I’d like very much like see them introduce the feature of ‘inline transclusion’ (i.e. for words and phrases within a sentence). Currently I’m using MSWord’s citation field codes to achieve the same, which is far from ideal ...)