Roam Research

Roam Research recently moved to a paid model. Not that I don’t support their product, it’s quite good, but it’s pushing me to realize that I can’t rely on other products to always behave the same or have my best interests at heart. They did, however, bring up a really good idea – that our thoughts are inherently graph-structured and keeping our notes in a similar fashion makes sense.

Memex provides a reasonable alternative: it allows me to take notes and annotations on webpages I read as well as full-text search through them. However, this doesn’t have the “web” built in. Rather, it relies on normal search. I want to continue writing notes with this graph based structure but with something that has a mobile app & looks a little better.

A realistic alternative might actually to just take a bunch of notes in Markdown, then create a function that automatically ingests tags in Jekyll and transforms them into links to appropriate pages. In this way, we could also detect and create bidirectional links.

I already have markdown & latex support, so this would probably only take a day to make.

In the meantime though, looks like I might have to use Notion.