(2020-07-19) Litt Foam Software As Curation

Geoffrey Litt: Foam: Software as Curation. So there’s a standard way that many note taking apps work these days. You choose an app, which includes a UI to read/write your notes, and cloud sync so you can work on your computer or your phone. Maybe you get decent offline support if you’re lucky. When it inevitably comes time to move on to the next app, you have to adapt to a whole new interface. And hopefully you can export your notes and port them over in some reasonable format

There is an enlightened crowd of Emacs users who have done everything in plaintext for decades and rave about it on Hacker News.

When openness and design are in tension, I choose design. I’m a Mac person, not a Linux on the Desktop person. But I wish I could have both.

That’s why I was excited to come across this tool called Foam, a Markdown note taking tool inspired by the latest darling app of the note taking world, Roam Research.

The editing experience of Foam is powered by VS Code.

While Foam does install its own extension, most of the value comes from installing other existing extensions and choosing good default settings. For example, it installs a few extensions that provide a nicer Markdown writing experience, and that tweak lots of things about how Markdown docs link to each other.

I think this is a neat way of creating value in software. The essential value of Foam isn’t code—it’s the opinionated curation of existing building blocks

I’ve previously pointed out that with a powerful enough extension system, end users can kind of start building their own software:

I don’t know yet if I’m going to actually move my note taking into Foam, but I’m giving it a shot

Challenges and questions…

Lowest common denominator formats

This summer I’m working with Ink and Switch on a project about decentralized schema evolution that hopes to make some headway on allowing tools to collaborate with each other, even if they use different data formats.

Multi-device / collaborative editing:

If we had better infrastructure for local-first software, perhaps it could help usher in a new world of open tools, built on a more modern abstraction than files?

Beyond text editing?:

What are other domains where we could use more generic tools?

If I was willing to pay for Foam, I’d want to pay the creators of the open source extensions behind it, not just the person who combined them into a product. And yet, I think the curation step is creating a lot of the value here too, and don’t want to undervalue it.