Great feedback
We do plan to eventually switch to wysiwyg -- it's much faster for our feature development to not for now, but when we're out of beta that'll be one of first changes we make
I did reply to that email, with a link to the comment.
Found the email. And in that light the feedback does come across as much more well intentioned.
I said (emphasis added):
So, if you have trouble reading tiny text or weird alignments drive you nuts, or if you need to be able to use your writing outside the note tool itself, I wouldn't recommend signing up for this thing right now. If you intend to use it as a standalone tool and the above-mentioned quirks wouldn't bother you, then go for it.
Thank you for the clarification.
The majority of outlining tools in my experience can accept a paste of plain text lines, indented with tabs.
Wow. You're totally right, completely missed that, and now understand your complaint. We had only been testing paste from google docs, workflowy, etc
fwiw you can import text files (.txt or .md) directly -- it'll interpret tabs, or spacing differences and convert that to the indentation structure. You can also import multiple files at once - it will also respect markdown and convert them into headings appropriately.
We'll definitely add the paste from plain text, until we get that built you could get around this either with import or by pasting into workflowy from text, and then pasting from there into Roam. We'll have paste in from plain text soon.
Or maybe you're just saying you would wrap the included text in a link? That wouldn't obviate the point of transclusion, but it'd be an irritant for my use case if I couldn't turn it off. I just want to be able to transparently include stuff, and find other documents that include those things.)
Solid point
It reminds me of some of Ted Nelson's innovative hypertext designs, like ZigZag
That's a really high complement. Appreciate it.
I must be able to not only bring in text I already have, but bring out text I produce.
Completely agree. We've had to prioritize the getting things in part, but getting things out is essential. The site was restricted access / invite only until a week ago, and we're still in beta (that's why it is free). We won't be charging for use until the export features are done.
in order to take real advantage of your transclusion feature, I'd have to be able to export usable markdown versions of the documents where said transclusion was occurring.
Totally agree -- we plan for export to be html links of the text of block to the original block. Probably will be done in next few weeks, but had some technical pre-reqs
I'm not sure if you're speaking to me or someone else here
Replying to you, but also largely speaking for the reader of your comment who may not be sure whether to try a new tool -- and may be discouraged to do so by your comment (I also wouldn't have found your comment except that another user of ours pointed me to it, so it didn't feel like you were writing for our team)
I consider even negative feedback from potential users or customers to be very helpful, especially if it lets me see their first impressions.
As do I -- but I did notice it felt quite different for you to do this in a public forum (and that it was followed by you encouraging others to not try the tool), rather than by responding to our onboarding email as every other user has so far.
The main thing you objected to with pasting content in is a feature we support - so I expect you've found a bug specific to your browser, OS, or the system you were coming from. Paste out also works, but is hard to get right for all tools people use as different apps respond differently to the clipboard, so we do appreciate when users tell us about places where things aren't quite right. Very happy to help you sort that out -- included our emails in an earlier reply.
We've got about 50 users in our slack channel discussing bugs, feature requests and updates. Very happy to send you an invite if you're interested.
We're working on it with Roam.
Agree it's a big deal
Some testimonials for Roam
**Roam is the productivity too that I didn't know I needed**
**I see it as a productivity map of my brain, showing to me how I organize thoughts in my mind.**
it helps me organize thoughts and **reduce the clutter in my head**. This is something that no productivity or organization tool, including Google Drive and Microsoft Office, **has ever offered to me before.**
-------------------
The most exciting piece of software I've yet tried...
A replacement for the essay... has the potential to be as profound a mental prosthetic as hypertext.
I spent a long time at the Double Crux workshop last year talking with folks about why the EA and x-risk community should care about developing better tools for thought.
Recently Andy Matsushak and Michael Nielsen wrote up some notes on the space, and why it is such a big deal. The first and last sections of the essay are most relevant to the claims I was making
I took some structured notes on the essay in our public Roam instance here
https://roamresearch.com/#/v8/help/page/J9ZMhYbkP
You can read the full essay here
https://numinous.productions/ttft/#top
and the section most relevant to that discussion here
We've launched https://RoamResearch.com for a wider audience
It's similar to Workflowy or GoogleDocs -- but with many more flexible ways of building structure between ideas and projects.
biggest deal is bi-directional linking (every page or bulletpoint collects all the links that point to it).
New version pushed up
Paste out now handles block-references well (they just appear as the text that appears in the references)
Should also paste out pretty nice into most apps
Pasting in from plain text (and from scrivener) keeps formatting
OneNote provides some very strange formatting when you try to paste it into our app (or most other apps) -- but it'll give you the right outline structure if you use Command-Shift-V for paste as plain text.