Poetic license on the title aside, I’m doubling down on Roam.
“Sometimes you have to let things go…” and so on, but that’s what I did earlier.
I spent a year trying out all kinds of alternatives, and figuring out their pros and cons.
In the end, I concluded, empirically-but-subjectively — this being for me and my use cases, yours may be different — that Roam is uniquely well-suited to my way of thinking.
Since then, things have gotten better, with two big changes:
- no limit on new graphs, and
- the availability of encrypted graphs.
Previously, I was reluctant to use Roam for “work stuff” — now I know I don’t have to worry
Previously, I was reluctant to adopt separate graphs for separate mental silos, because “hey, I don’t want to waste my last remaining graph on that!”. Now, that isn’t a concern.
There will always be other products around, and people will continue to make decisions based on a variety of factors, and they should.
I would like to see a couple of features (again, this is from my personal experience, and I have no expectations of seeing them fulfilled anytime soon).
It would be good to have the ability to have different graphs open in different tabs. Not a very big deal because I don’t switch that often, and if I did I could use different browsers, but … it would be nice to do this easily.
Next up: more spaces in the document — or at the ability to carve out at least one additional space to split nodes on to. I understand this is hard and must be introduced carefully, if at all. If a general solution is too hard, three is a better number than two (before anyone points it out — yes, in a way, the sidebar is a third space, but c’mon).
I will say that for a product that affords a dizzying amount of creative flexibility as Roam does, you need a spare aesthetic and I commend the development team for having the discipline to stick to it.
Abacus Noir 