Roam
*A note-taking tool for networked thought.
I stumbled across org-roam (emulating Roam in Emacs), while looking for a way of improving my flow of working on my wiki, and am loving it so far.
Roam attempts to implement a near-full conception of hypertext as originally conceived by visionaries like Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson.
It implements a few key features of 1980s vintage hypertext visions — block-level addressability, transclusion (changes in referenced blocks being “transfer-included” wherever they are cited), and bidirectional linking — that utterly transform the writing experience at the finger-tips level.
You end up organizing high-level structure as you work at fleshing out low-level chunks of information, because the UX collapses high and low-level thinking into a single behavior.
It can also do note-taking, workflows (like kinda-sorta competitor Notion), and wiki-like knowledge management, but those use cases are not as interesting to me. Conspiracy theories and extended universes, in the best senses of those terms — escaped reality construction might be the general category — is what Roam wants to be about.
Written in Clojure.
You write things, and create relationships between them. Don't have to worry about meticulously putting things into a hierarchy. Using back links, and link tags get around this. You can use it for knowledge management, as a task manager, a CRM and a tool for writing.
Writing a block once and then just referencing that block elsewhere is nice.
1 Elsewhere
1.1 In my garden
Notes that link to this note (AKA backlinks).