Roam and TheBrain, together

Where should I keep my notes, TheBrain or Roam? I decided earlier this year to use Roam, and was confident in that decision until TheBrain version 12 added backlinks.

Now all bets are off.

With proper backlink handling, I’m considering bringing private notes back into TheBrain. I love the Plex and how it enables me to quickly gather context about a topic simply by looking at it. I already have thousands of inter-linked thoughts in my Brain and finding things there has always been fast and easy.

But I still love publishing to my public Roam database, so where do I write about something that might just as well be public? For example, I would like to keep notes about this blog, but where?

How about both!?

I sometimes forget that TheBrain includes a nice built-in (webkit-based) browser, accessed by simply attaching a URL to a thought. This means I can drag any page from Roam into a related thought in TheBrain and it gives me the best of both worlds. The screen shot above shows an example. The Plex on the left shows all my links in TheBrain, and the notes pane on the right shows the page in Roam. I can edit the Roam content right in TheBrain, but I can also link private thoughts or take private notes in the Notes pane, like this…

TheBrain Notes paneTheBrain Notes pane

This is good.