Notes for October 29, 2024

Roam > Obsidian

Org-roam vs other Roam-alikes | Baty.net

Me, in May, 2020:

My ~/org directory has everything. It’s not just my notes repository. It’s my Journal, my todo list, my authoring environment, my reference manager, my time tracker, my PDF viewer/annotator, and sometimes my email and RSS client. I love the idea that I can ripgrep in ~/org and find anything. I love that everything always behaves the same way (bindings, editing, file handling, etc.). I love that it’s all local and free and is more likely than any of the alternatives to be around for decades.

I contain multitudes (and I want them out!)

The best way to continue liking someone is to stop following them on social media.

Round and round with Roam and friends

I hate this feeling. My brain has been oscillating so quickly between my modes that it feels like it’s vibrating. And not in a good way. Here’s how it’s been going:

I was reading my feeds early in the morning, and saw a couple of photos of some well-used notebooks. You know the ones, lots of bookmarks and edge markings and the whole thing looks swollen due to it being over-stuffed with interesting stuff. I’ve been struggling to continue using my Leuchtturm because the paper isn’t great and I don’t like tiny dotgrid pages. So I grabbed one of my half-filled Midori MD notebooks, which I love, and started writing with my favorite fountain pen.

Shortly after that, someone online mentioned Roam Research. I put down my pen, and started playing in my old Roam database. I felt a powerful wave of note-taking nostalgia. I don’t know if you remember, but when Roam showed up it changed everything about note-taking for me. Links, backlinks, transclusion, daily notes, all of it.

In July of 2020, I paid $500 for a 5-year subscription to Roam. I was a “True Believer™”.

Then Conaw got weird. The #RoamCult thing got embarrassing. Roam raised a ton of money and then seemed to mostly stop doing anything really new. Obsidian showed up. And Logseq, and Tana, and well, you know. There were suddenly alternatives. Cheaper ones that seemed to be getting more attention by the devs than Roam. So I switched (to all of the above, at least briefly).

Now this morning I re-installed and configured Org-roam and have been making my Denote notes work with it.

It’s been quite a week, and it’s only Tuesday!