Discussion of Roam-like Knowledge Managers

Posted by Jonas Hvid
Apr 19, 2020 at 03:11 PM

I’ve actually been working on my own knowledge manager, directly inspired by
Roam. It’s called Thinktool, and there’s a version publicly available at
https://thinktool.io if anyone’s interested.

Thinktool is basically a combination of three ideas:

1. Looks and behaves like an outliner
2. Items can have multiple parents, inspired by TheBrain
3. Roam-style bidirectional linking

The main advantage over Roam for me is that in Thinktool you don’t have to
organize your notes into “pages”. Instead you just have a single outline, where
each item can be in multiple places. It’s technically possible to replicate
something like this in Roam with transclusion, but it gets pretty awkward for
large outlines.

When you look at an item in Thinktool, it automatically shows you all the other
places where that item is. That includes both other parents (like TheBrain) and
textual links (like Roam). This approach gives you a lot of freedom to structure
your notes how you want.

It’s in a pre-alpha state right now, but I’m using it myself. I’d love to get
some feedback on whether this is a useful concept and if so, what the most
important improvements would be.

(By the way, I’ve been lurking this forum for a while, but this is my first post
here. I hope it’s not considered too rude that my first post is about my own
product!)