I completely agree and honestly, despite Iâm one who expressed his vote on a specific feature here, this thread is making me somehow uncomfortable.
I can see why people are looking for this type of functionality but I also think that this is a separate app. Thatâs not to say I wouldnât like to see it, or use it. Maybe one day. 
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This is a good, sane look and I support it 100%
I think improving backlinks (not copying Roam) will excite the majority of the user base. Thanks Dynalist team!
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Absolutely agree. Bolting things on to Dynalist doesnât make Dynalist a better Dynalist; it would make it a worse âwhateverâ
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Happy to see you agree to this. Weâll definitely try our best to learn from the things that make sense â step 1 is the âShow all referencesâ option we just released today: 2020 January update (Email to Dynalist)
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I agree itâs very necessary to keep the unique id. I wonder though if itâs not easy to also attach a name to a thing, and you can https://dynalist.io/named_link/ariana%20grande to get to it, and that functions as a redirect to https://dynalist.io/d/EeoH9pVyzPezU2T_i7iBF_4fM
But the big deal is being able to go #[Ariana Grande] and it generates the link. And the big deal of that is itâs easier for me to remember a name than it is to locate that item and copy/paste the link.
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there seems to be a lot of hype around Roam recently. but Iâve found it FAR too confusing in checking it out vs Dynalist
I totally agree with keeping Dynalist as it is, but honestly Iâd love to see you build a new knowledge management app with most of the Dynalist front end in tact 
Roam has me hooked after a few days. I use it to dump my brain every day and it is very freeing to not worry over creating pages, or renaming them, or creating indexes⌠I have about 40 pages so far and it isnât stressing me out yet because I didnât even know until I just went and looked. Weâll see how it scales over time.
It isnât that I couldnât do the same thing in Dynalist but the speed with which I can write or integrate new ideas is pretty amazing. I think this is mostly a mental thingâŚthere are dozens and dozens of tiny decisions I donât have to make regarding organization, linking, and tagging.
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Been using Dynalist for a while, moved from workflowy, however I find I use it less and less. I think what TJ_Goan said above:
Is the thing that makes Roam the most interesting for me. It would free me to just write whatever and donât worry about organization because the links/backlinks will link everything together for me.
Currently whenever I want to note down something in Dynalist, there is a mental and time burden where I need to think about where it should go in the overall hierarchy before being able to write it.
The automatic daily entries in Roam look like a great âinboxâ where I can write whatever I need to and if I do links properly then it will be easy to find it whenever I need it - practically everything I wrote about the topic would show up for me automatically.
I think Dynalist can definitely replicate these core advantages/workflows that Roam has and integrate it with the great features it already has.
Here are my ideas:
- [[ ]] style links currently already works, but could be improved a bit. When typing/editing, it is insanely long because it includes the whole super long dynalist url. This ruins the editing experience. This is because the [[ ]] gets converted into a
[]()block. If it was handled specially so it still showed as [[ the item text ]] then that would help a lot ⌠or maybe at least the url in the[]()might be a special shortened one. This would help a lot with encouraging usage of internal linking. - [[ ]] suggestions should prioritize items that already have references, should also show number of existing references so user is sure they are picking the correct one.
- Next feature is to add special âdatesâ file with âdate itemsâ. It would automatically be a hierarchy of year / month / dates like this:
It will contain a list of all notes that reference that date, a list of all notes that were created on that date, and you can also add any additional items that you want to each date.
Any dates that are not referenced/empty will be skipped. Possibly clicking or ctrl-clicking on a date tag in other notes would jump into a zoomed view of that date item. New date entries can be created and you can create entries for the future. - Create a button to quickly jump to todayâs date item. Maybe have an option to start the app at todayâs date item by default. With the option to just note down things in todayâs date item, then you would be free of the burden of having to figure out where the item has to go in before even writing anything as it currently is. The ability to create date items for the future would also work nicely as a reminder system because when that date comes your Dynalist would show everything noted down for that date (if you have it as the default note to show). There are probably a whole lot of other features this âdate itemâ system would enable.
- Should be able to create new items when typing [[ ]]. Could be the first option in the search popup. Where it would be created is the question. Probably easiest ways is maybe the user can specify where to create by default in settings. Or maybe default could be in todayâs date item.
- Automatically list references (backlinks) of the item currently zoomed to at the bottom. When viewing a list of child items where some of the child items have references, then show some kind of icon that can be clicked to expand to show the references to that item.
These features combined with the powerful organization tools Dynalist already has I think would result in an extremely powerful functionality set.
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That would be amazing!
Thanks for thinking through this. I must admit, trying out Roamâs journal approach has made the constant question of where to move items in Dynalist seem a little cumbersome.
So why not use the inbox as a defacto Today section? It has the shortcuts and extensions to automatically create items there. It can be cleared out daily. The items still have to be filed, but it would at least enable flow during the day.
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Thanks for thinking through this. If you havenât read it, I hope you can read my reply on this: Roam Research, new web-based outliner that supports transclusion & wiki features - thoughts?
Basically, weâll consider all the features that make sense to Dynalist and not try to imitate Roam Research. The points you mentioned seem to be in the direction of imitating Roam Research in Dynalist (somewhat awkwardly because Dynalist wasnât built exactly for this), but Dynalist is a outliner first and foremost.
Having to think about where to put new notes is an overhead, yes, but it can also bring value. It allows you to find the content even if youâve forgotten all the keywords â if you follow the hierarchy, you should find it. If you take flat notes (just one line after the other, in the most extreme case) and link them together with tags and internal links, itâs less work but less organized.
I understand that peopleâs habits change all the time. If you want less organization and more loose links, Roam Research might be a better match for you. Unfortunately as much as we try to, we canât satisfy everyone, especially when peopleâs needs and habits change from time to time.
Itâs hard to say no, but in this case weâll have to take a stand so we can focus on building the best outliner like we originally set out to do. The new tools are always shiny, but we donât want to forget what we started Dynalsit for
I hope thatâs understandable! Thanks again for taking the time to think through this and write it up.
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A perfect answer Erica. I completely agree with your position.
There is plenty ahead already on the road map, some of it long standing, which will add a lot of value for the majority of users. Taking detours to emulate a similar, but essentially different, app would be a major mistake in my opinion.
I think ultimately the choice for people will come down to this:
how important is hierarchy to you?
Itâs totally unreasonable for Dynalist to suddenly become something that it isnât in order to imitate something else. I get that. Dynalist was BUILT to be an outliner, and an outliner needs hierarchy.
However, for someone like me, I find the hierarchy more restrictive than liberating. I have agonized about whether to have a primarily list-based system using tags to call up information vs having a primarily tag-based system using lists as timelines and documents as buckets. I go back and forth because I always feel the drawbacks of each type.
The idea of a system where it doesnât matter where I put something because it can live anywhere I need it is amazing to me.
Maybe Iâll find a drawback that I havenât yet considered, maybe the pricing structure will turn me off, maybe Iâll experience soul-crushing data loss on an app thatâs still in beta. Who knows. For now Iâm definitely roam curious.
And I appreciate Dynalist fast-tracking the ability to see whatâs linking to an item.
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I definitely understand your reasoning. Currently I am trying Roam Research out, and yes, it may be that Roam might be a better match for me, and it may also turn out that in the end it is just a case of shiny new things being exciting. And trying to please everyone is definitely not a good way to run a business I agree.
But I would suggest to please do keep an eye on this and maybe look at it again in the future whether these kinds of features make sense. I have found that the ease of creating new notes in Roam Research for example is an extremely liberating experience and I donât think it would detract from the experience of Dynalist in any way.
In general, there are very good reasons why people are excited about Roam Research, and while Dynalist is an outliner first and foremost, Roam Research is also an outliner that still has the ability to do hierarchical stuff. But these few additional abilities (extremely easy to link internally, easy to see back links, easy to create new pages) just adds a whole new powerful organization tool that is more organic and requires less âorganization overheadâ.
You might have already seen this article, as it triggered a lot of interest in Roam. I was just happening to go through older Hacker News top content and found it. If you havenât, it explains a lot.
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Am I wrong when I say all of this is easily implementable with Dynalist?
Personally I use the Planner Template of @Daryl_Mander. So of you want to have a roam-like workflow just capture everything in under the correspoinding date. When you want to see everything of one topic it is possible use the search syntax to filter by tag keyword etc.
Maybe I overread something, but what exactly is the difference to roam then?
Erica, having tags that allow spaces at Dynalist is a possibility? This would be great!
If this is done, could we make it like #(Tag with Spaces) or #[Tag with Spaces]? I dislike #Tag with Spaces#
A planner like this has a limitation that roam (in my opinion) has a better solution for.
For example, in a list like this, where do your projects live? They either need a dedicated home, where you need a system for recording what you did that day that exists both in the project home and in the date calendar, or they live somewhere forever associated with a specific date. You can use tags to call up your projects but what if you want a clean look at all of them for high-level prioritization? Moving things around from this view isnât easy either.
The benefit of roam is that a page can live in multiple places at the same time. So in my outline of todayâs notes I can have a node that says I did x y and z on #project-A and that reference can live in my calendar. The big difference is that if I then click on the #project-A tag, rather than doing a search for those tags, #project-A is its own full page, where I can see everything related to #proejct-A in one place â both the main outline Iâve created as well as any other places in my system that Iâve linked to it (including todayâs calendar reference). Because tags ARE pages, it would be like if Dynalist made tags their own note links.
Now, you might not need or want this, and thatâs totally fine, but the answer to the question of if this is easily implementable with Dynalist is a definite no (at least in terms of what users are able to do). A Dynalist node has a permanent location because itâs a hierarchy. Roam is flat, and pages exist anywhere and everywhere I want them at the same time.
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