Why Foam instead of MDX

Date: 2022-01-03

Nicer UX

• the UX is just nicer (tab will indent lists)
• pasting images is super nice with foam
  • the UX with MDX is manually copying
• table of contents markdown creator/updater VSCode extension

Lesser points

• I can use (beautify) WYSIWYG markdown editors like Typora or Zettlr or Obsidian
  • regular Markdown (although I could get away with using MDX with those editors)
• I haven't really used MDX that much anyway

Problems with foam

I realized that I can just use GitHub

It doesn't have SEO or customizability but I don't really care about that right now.

• My main concern is just getting stuff out of my head and into this system

I use Zettlr as my text editor because it has a nice left bar where I can navigate through all the files

I tried uploading to GitHub pages but encountered these problems

• I have to create index.md pages that I'd have to manually
  • I want to replicate the directory structure
• 2+ levels deep folders
  • I like organization and grouping
  • Foam's github pages
• backlinks and forward links
• automatic table of contents
  • technically, this can be generated in markdown but the UI isn't the best
    • I'd like to to be on the side rather than as a part of the content
• no search

Alternatives I want to investigate

• neuron
  • apparently it's in maintenance mode
  • emanote is the successor
  • but it looks like it's not stable yet
• mkdocs
• GitBook: doesn't support 2+ levels deep
• Bookstack and other hosted wikis
  • we use this for work but you'd have to host a server and I'd rather not pay for a $5 a month DigitalOcean server

  • it's really nice and is the basis of what I'd like

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Last update: 2023-04-24