What does HackerNews think of foam?

I started using Foam[0] a few years ago, but the more I used it, the more I dropped all the tedious bits, and it became nothing more than a big, evolving markdown repo.

I switched from vscode (back) to vim, and it has worked as well or better than it did before. I follow my own rules. I like the Zettelkasten idea of one idea per card, but if I put more related things in the same .md file, that's OK. I didn't like the flat directory structure, and so I have dirs organized by category. My /bar directory is inside my /cooking directory, and for whatever reason, that makes sense to me. Ripgrep doesn't care, and I always find what I'm looking for.

This markdown hierarchy, that still lives in a repo called "foam", has become indispensable to me.

[0] https://github.com/foambubble/foam

I read this as a prophecy of Foam (https://github.com/foambubble/foam), Obsidian.md (https://obsidian.md/), and the like. See this thread on Foam from 2020:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23666950

Despite ”design for knowledge based organizations” being the title of the article in the PDF, this is perhaps more about approach and capabilities for organizing flow from capture to use to pruning of knowledge, more than the organizations working on knowledge.

There is one aside about the organization itself:

> Engelbart sees every organization as a collection of interacting knowledge domains. He has focused his research on designing support structures for knowledge collection and refinementwithin and across these knowledge domains.

But then that jumps down into a given domain, and goes on to propose a knowledge management approach within that (and each) domain.

This is where it gets interestingly predictive of the recent coalescence in knowledge management tools emerging after the two dark age decades of style over semantics.

The first idea is a concept of bringing knowledge in, working it, and keeping it. He calls this Concurrent Development, Integration, and Application of Knowledge (CODIAK) process.

To make this workable he proposes a time-relevance layered approach very similar to the (perhaps easier to action) “PARA” method adopted by many KM tool users today:

https://fortelabs.com/para

After this, he goes into functional implications, and describes almost to a T capabilities in the latest round of knowledge management tooling “systems” such as, say, Obsidian.md, built on standards (markdown, wikilinks, front matter) and extensibility enabling journaling, querying, views, as first class citizens.

When hypertext markup iterated into a page style description advertorial tool rather than linked semantic knowledge structure, that left an opening for the tools we’re seeing now. Today, Obsidian.md is close to the mark, except, of course, for approachability by casuals. For casuals, consider e.g. Craft.do (https://www.craft.do/).

If you’re doing a comparison before jumping in, it’s worth diffing the tools against Englebart’s take.

I’d argue he’s dead on.

For those looking for an Obsidian like tool for commercial usage, check out Foam[0]. It covers most of the core Obsidian features and it's implemented as a VS Code extension with all of the advantages that entails. Of course, you won't have access to the Obsidian extensions and I do miss the live preview feature and the Android app but it's way more than serviceable.

[0]: https://github.com/foambubble/foam

I personally use https://github.com/foambubble/foam

Works great and straight forward to setup.

Looks good, but not being able to access the raw files means tools like foam won’t work https://github.com/foambubble/foam . There’s a whole community using foam that would appreciate an app like this.

To be fair you mention you have your own knowledge map utilities built in so maybe that’s good enough to use directly. I just didn’t notice that looking at your website.

Price seems a little high, it’s higher than Evernote which does have some minimal markdown support now and offline editing. This would need more features to justify the cost but that’s just imo.

> As soon as you are disconnected from the internet Supernotes will enter a 'read-only' mode. You will still be able to browse, read and search your notes, like so:

Is this the same with the app? If I’m out some place with no signal can I write/update a note? It would be frustrating having to wait for your phone to connect first.