"A Note About Notes..."

Posted: 02 January, 2021

I've been using QOwnNotes for the last couple of years, and although it's been robust and reliable on the desktop (and more importantly, cross-platform), I've had a few niggles with it, particularly when I want to access, and update, items on iOS.

I'm always looking for ways to optimise my note taking, and toward the end of November I stumbled on (Foam)[https://foambubble.github.io/foam/]

It's loosely based on Roam -- a paid for service that I've not tried -- built on VSCode and Git. Like QOwnNotes, it's markdown based (meaning my old notes were easy to migrate), but where it excels is in the use of wiki-links for relationship mappings, which, over time, link to form a mind-map/graph that you can visualise and use to navigate.

Foam uses several existing VSCode plugins for a lot of its Markdown related functionality. It's fast to edit, has some niceties for lists and TODOs, is quick to navigate around and easily versioned.

VSCode has been lightning fast for me, so the time between having an idea and it being committed to a list somewhere has been negligible, meaning Foam's been a good fit for my workflow.

(iOS being iOS has meant editing on phone and iPad has been a touch more fiddly, but I have (finally) found a robust Markdown editor that'll syncronise directly from my Nextcloud instance. A marginal improvement over the QOwnNotes situation)

If you're not into VSCode, there's Org-Roam and Vim-Roam. I tried org, but couldn't get on with it, so YMMV.

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