Thanks for thinking through this. I must admit, trying out Roamās 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.
Thanks for thinking through this. If you havenāt read it, I hope you can read my reply on this: Roam Research, new web-based outliner that supports transclusion & wiki features - thoughts?
Basically, weāll 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 wasnāt 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 youāve forgotten all the keywords ā 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, itās less work but less organized.
I understand that peopleās 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 canāt satisfy everyone, especially when peopleās needs and habits change from time to time.
Itās hard to say no, but in this case weāll 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 donāt want to forget what we started Dynalsit for 
I hope thatās understandable! Thanks again for taking the time to think through this and write it up.
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?
Itās totally unreasonable for Dynalist to suddenly become something that it isnāt 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 doesnāt matter where I put something because it can live anywhere I need it is amazing to me.
Maybe Iāll find a drawback that I havenāt yet considered, maybe the pricing structure will turn me off, maybe Iāll experience soul-crushing data loss on an app thatās still in beta. Who knows. For now Iām definitely roam curious.
And I appreciate Dynalist fast-tracking the ability to see whatās linking to an item.
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 donāt 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 āorganization overheadā.
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 havenāt, it explains a lot.
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 isnāt easy either.
The benefit of roam is that a page can live in multiple places at the same time. So in my outline of todayās 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 ā both the main outline Iāve created as well as any other places in my system that Iāve linked to it (including todayās 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 thatās 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 itās a hierarchy. Roam is flat, and pages exist anywhere and everywhere I want them at the same time.
Interesting, may I ask why? #[tag with spaces] is one more character to type. Is it because itās easier to see whatās between the brackets?
ha, I read this article and I immediately bought Natās course on how to use Roam. Iām deep into the rabbit hole.
Using parenthesis is just more consistent with other [markup](markdown)
The ease of creating new notes require no two note to have the same title, no? That was the biggest deal-breaker I mentioned in the post I pointed you to. In the current set up of Dynalist, [[non-existent page name]] will create a new document under root and you canāt have two with the same name. Roam will merge pages with the same name.
Definitely, we extensively test out all the new competitors. In addition to being interested new tools like you guys, this is also market research work! I want to reassure you that we never intend to dismiss them as merely new tools.
That was my thought too, because it seems more consistent with the tag system right now.
#[tag with spaces] makes it a little confusing (āis it a tag or a link?ā).
There are solutions to this. For example when you type [[ currently dynalist shows a search box. Maybe the first option could be ācreate itemā and after you choose it and hit enter the search box becomes a name input box. Then when you type and hit enter again that item is created and the markdown text becomes [item name just entered](dynalist url of new item). It is just a UX adjustment to keep you in the flow and allow you to create new items and reference them immediately.
To make it even quicker, after typing [[ you could just type the name of new item, and then maybe hit Ctrl-Enter and Dynalist would know that you want to create a new item with whatever typed.
I could flesh this out even more (Iām a software developer too so UI/UX design is also part of my job), but what Iām trying to say is that some of these things arenāt necessarily that big of a change to what is already in Dynalist, and they will give a lot of power to it and in the future could even prevent people from even trying Roam cause Dynalist can already do most of it.
The back-references youāre adding is already a big part of that and thatās great!
Thank you for the clarification! Yes projects would need their dedicated place somewhere in the hierarchy. Maybe bookmarked or linked for quick access.
I initially thought Roam is something similar to Dynalist but now I understand itās something completely different.
My personal opinion is, that if the user thinks trough his hierarchy and makes up a good system it takes next to nothing to put in everything at the right place. But admit that this is strongly depending on personal preference.
Edit:
In Roam you use a single page to store all your notes. This page for me in Dynalist is a bullet in the hierarchy and I store every new note (tagged and with references) under this bullet.
My hierarchy is very simple and I can move every new not really fast into that hierarchy.
Good real life example of one of many workflows that Roam allows https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvWic15iXjk
I always wanted to have multiple dynalist docs in one window, with d&d between them. In powerpack that was achieved partially with iframes, but it took more RAM and time to load than it should, and d&d was not possible. That alone would open much more possibilities, I wonder why no one mentions this, right sidebar is one of the most useful things in Roam and itās totally possible to recreate it in Dynalist. If I were the owner of Dynalist, creating components for embedding docs (and queries/search results) within docs, and docs in second column, would be my first thing to do.
Obviously itās for people who uses such things to manage their life in digital format in more sophisticated ways than writing todo/groceries lists and simple notes. Probably tiny minority of users, so it might be not worth the time.
I see very little in the video that is about the unique organizational system of Roam. Just parallel viewing of two documents. What I would like is to be able to pull an element of a document in by reference and view that inline.
It was literally what he was doing there entire video, using references from other docs all the time. One can use embeds instead of references too, to make that āclonedā stuff editable in place, when needed.
Each time he drags something and green ā+ā icon appears, it creates reference to the stuff he is dragging. (by alt+drag on mac / ctrl+drag on win)
