Foam

I want to build a second brain, but I also want to own my brain.

Faux Roam

Roam Research is cool, but it's a proprietary, non-free tool. I'm sure that in the future, Roam will develop a killer feature on top of the knowledge graph they're building, but for the time being it's a glorified text editor with good keyboard shortcuts and two-way linking between documents.

Enter Foam, a Roamlike focused work environment built in VSCode.

See also:

• Thoughts on Branding
• Should I create a new language
• Would be cool to publish pages
• Random thoughts and feature ideas

Pros over Roam

• Free and free, easily migrateable hosting (Git)
• Customise your editor (colors, plugins, keyboard shortcuts, etc)
• Use Git history to get more context on what you were working on when
  • Add metadata like "Raw thoughts", or "Meeting with John"
  • Roll back changes
• CMD+P to navigate between files
• Full freedom to write free content, embedded code samples with syntax highlighting
• Run code with Code Runner, Jupyter Notebooks etc

What can we already do without any custom code?

• Light editor theme
• Markdown All In One plugin set
  • File name autocompletiong for links
  • List indentation
  • Keyboard shortcuts
  • Checklists (alt-c)
  • Cmd+Click file name to navigate to it
• Using GitLens hover annotations to remember when changes were made
  • Maybe do something cool with gitlens modes
• Git automator
  • Cmd+Shift+A to add all files
  • Cmd+Shift+Z to push all commits
  • Automatic commit messages (TODO, see Git Automator readme)

How to make my setup usable for others without code

• Template workspace/repo to clone
  • GitHub has a feature for this
• Comes with a .vscode/settings.json
  • Recommended plugins
    • Markdown all in one
    • Some editor theme
    • Git Lens
    • Git Automator
  • Custom shortcuts (if possible in workspace?)

Missing Roam features

Some things I would have to write code for

Big features

• Unlinked references and back links from other pages (this is a big one)
  • Could be implemented as a terminal view of sort, run a language server in the background and show them in the "output" tab like you show test results in jest
• Automatically create a new page when referencing an unknown file
  • This support could be added to MD All in one
• Knowledge graph visualiser
  • Trivial to build once graph is assembled

Minor UX things

• Can't just call it Some page, must be some_page.md
• Should be easier to reference for a file in workspace without [](), for example just [filename] (no extensions needed, workspace can treat extensionless files as Foam files)
• Renaming/moving documents requires to rename all references
  • Could probably be automated