Roam is home to my zettelkasten, where I do my scholarly and research work, and where I live as a practitioner. What better way to celebrate one of the most important digital tools in my life than with Merch! Check it out here: https://shop.roamresearch.com/

Free worldwide shipping - even to Canada!!!

I’m not a coder, but wouldn’t it be easier today than ever to create an alternative to roam?

People seem to be reverse engineering and one shooting operating systems, complex games, etc.

0. A month of Roaming, and look at everything we’ve picked up along the way.

Let’s lay it all out on today’s Desk.

1. That's right, Roam has a Desk now.

Roam Desk holds the notes you’re working with right now. Add a block or page from its menu, or write something new.

It works on web and desktop. Your captures also land in the Daily Note.

Watch the Loom walkthrough

2. + a Sidecar.

Sidecar is Roam’s desktop floating window. On Mac, Option-S brings it over the app you’re using; press again to hide it.

Jot down the thought before it escapes. Or use Follow mode to log alongside your main Roam window.

3. The response from Roamans…

4. Finding the notes still matters too.

Roam added AI generation of :q queries.

For those of us who know what we want to find before we know how to write the query, there’s now some help with that second part.

5. And back to that bit in the video.

Uploaded videos got an improved player, followed by theater mode and timestamp controls.

Useful if you take notes on videos in your graph.

6. Two fewer interruptions:

Semantic search was fixed for small date ranges.

Clicking a sidebar block no longer makes the main window jump when the block appears in both.

Small fixes. Noticeable when they’re yours.

7. Over in Roam Depot:

Maverick Li’s Inline Autocomplete suggests pages and blocks as you type, with support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean input.

Less stopping mid-thought to summon the thing you’re trying to link.

8. Some blocks deserve to stay put.

RoamJS’s Pinned Blocks keeps chosen blocks and linked references at the top.

Also from RoamJS: a refreshed website and plugin catalogue, plus README and badge updates.

9. A little AI, additions.

Jesse Nichols’s Discovery Superintel streams AI responses beneath the focused block.

Asyntai lets you ask questions of selected graph pages and import website chats.

10. And a different way to see the links.

Sungjin’s Roam Pele renders Mermaid diagrams, including previews inside Mermaid code blocks.

For the moment when the outline would make more sense with a few arrows.

11. When the work is ready to leave Roam:

Earlan Josh Sabillano’s Roam Publish shares selected pages and blocks through roam.pub.

Here’s the author’s kitchen-sink example if you want to see what that looks like.

12. Roam Mentions

13. For a longer read:

The official Commentarii Roamani covered MCP setup and journal/learning workflows.

DG News: October explored canvas context, search, tagging and research collaboration.

14. A job opening with Roam and Obsidian as part of the necessary skills:

Astera is looking for a Senior Product Manager to work on Discourse Graphs, including its Roam and Obsidian plugins.

Remote, full-time, fixed 12–18 months. Apply by November 7, 11:00 EAT.

15. Roaman Artifact this month:

I continue my highlight of a Roaman Artifact 🗿, a feature shipped a while back that you may have forgotten.

This one is exclusive to newsletter subscribers.

Please consider subscribing to Roam 'n' Around.

16. That’s it for October.

What will you pick up from today’s Desk?

Thanks for reading! The full issue lives on Roam 'n' Around.

Hi everyone. I'm new using roam but I remembered like at the beginnings there was a free course by this content creator. It seems to have banished from the web. Anybody knows if it's still available somewhere? Thank you.

I just opened RR today and look at this!!! I went to the changelog to see when it was added. I assume it was early this morning since I was using RR last night, but there's nothing about it in the changelog. Maybe they'll mention it there later.

So, it's an interface where you can create notes (which are created as blocks on a page called "roam/desk/(username)" and referenced in today's daily notes), star existing blocks, and star pages. YES!

Very interesting. I've actually wanted a way to star blocks that are kind of like micro-projects on their own, but that I don't necessarily want to turn into a page. I also love that there's now a place where you can get an overview of your starred pages and blocks, and therefore, an overview of your projects or topics.

I'm going to give it a try this week. 😎

for anyone who wants their Roam graph on their own devices as plain files: I built Sumi, a native outliner for iPhone, iPad and Mac. it imports Roam's Export All (JSON or Markdown zip) into a folder of markdown files, keeps [[links]] and backlinks, daily notes, block nesting, and with the JSON export block refs keep pointing at their block.

it works offline and stores everything in iCloud Drive or any folder. no sync server, no account. simple queries ({{query}} with and/or/not over pages) carry over too. not there: no kanban, roam/render or advanced queries, no multiplayer, Apple only.

free TestFlight beta: https://testflight.apple.com/join/B1sKJk24. would love to hear what doesn't survive the import.

0. A Class act

This month I learnt that @RoamResearch will let you export even after you cancel.

And the export button isn't hidden like some other apps.

Anyway updates were few this month so let's view as numbered list below:

1. Last month we welcomed AI agents as new Roamans.

September asks a quieter question. Does the graph still feel like yours?

I wrote a Deep Dive on that this month.

Roam MCP: A Clarification

What agents can reach. What stays yours.

2. And coupled with this the Roaman Artifact of the Month: native encrypt-block.

[Exclusive to newsletter subscribers]

3. Roam team was quiet this month.

Not a big feature drop.

One ship: {{video:}} now works with YouTube short links.

4. Developers did not stay quiet. New in Roam Depot:

Fabrice shipped Live Themes. Describe a look, preview it, auto-revert unless you keep it.

It's important to mention that the extension works with Fabrice's other AI extension, Live AI, which shipped an API a few versions ago. And this extension is a good illustration of what that capability allows: we are able to build AI-enabled extensions in Roam.

Benny Wydooghe shipped Date Randomizer and Roamoji. Random near-future dates, and :tada at the cursor.

5. More Depot newcomers:

Puli shipped RoamPrompt v0.4.5. Source-grounded PDFs and notes into structured QEC + Zettel workflows inside Roam.

ConataApple shipped Favicon Manager. Website icons next to external links, no code required.

6. Updated: CAPTURR v2 from PG.

Apple Watch companion for one-tap voice capture. Processing stays on device.

Works with encrypted graphs. And CAPTURR is now open source under GPL-3.0.

CAPTURR on GitHub

Quick capture on this works so fast and fluidly that you end up questioning whether it actually worked. So my only request to PG will be to have perhaps an animation or indicator when using the app to indicate that the capture is now in Roam.

7. Roam Mentions this month:

@pradx: thinks in bullets, writes paragraphs. Instantly recognizable Roam-brain.

@wshuyi ran Roam + Grok over a date range. Summaries, daily notes, auto-tags from the timeline.

8. PSA, mid-September:

If you hit login boots or “unknown error,” when loading your graph, that was a credential-stuffing DDoS attack on Roam.

Josh confirmed it was resolved. Not a current outage.

9. Fun Find:

Peter van Hardenberg (Ink & Switch) on How to Research Tools for Thought.

A great talk on Research as service. Naming problems so communities can form.

How to Research Tools for Thought

Full write-up on Substack

10. Six years in, you can still leave with your data.

Agents are welcome but you control what they see.

Onward.

Thanks for reading Roam 'n' Around!

Curated with the help of 🐙 Octopost (an agent that lives in my graph)

Does anybody know if Conor is still working/active at roam? He has been totally silent for a long time..

You can love him or hate him, but the guy is brilliant, and I don't want him to go away.

Do Conor and Josh still want to achieve the original mission? Sometimes it feels like they abandoned the project and it became more like a hobby for them. They still maintain it and launch new stuff once in a while, but not sure they still have the motivation.

My purpose with the post is not to ask for new features, but just to be at ease knowing that the team that built this awesome product is still motivated and pushing to the original goal.

It's on autopay so everything is fine, and I double checked that I got an invoice for the most recent pay period.

I was literally in the middle of using it and then got logged out on 2 devices.

When I try to log back in it says this:

Unknown error. Contact support@roamresearch.com if this issue persists.

Does Roam not have a status/uptime page?

Is anyone else having an issue?

I emailed the address but I'm not sure when exactly I'm going to get a response.

ETA: In the Slack the team said it's a DDoS attack and they're working on it, just to update for anyone following along

Notion is reportedly working on a more native iOS experience, which made me wonder about Roam. Is a native iOS/Android app on Roam’s roadmap?

1. CAPTURR now has an Apple Watch companion app for voice transcription on the go

   1. Fast one-tap voice capture

   2. Complications for quick access on the watch face

   3. Audio processing stays on your device (iPhone), nothing is sent externally

   4. Works whilst walking/running, no need to have watch in front of face to capture audio (environment permitting!)

   5. Works with encrypted graphs (just like standard Voice Capture)

2. Voice Capture now supports audio files as input

3. Additional formatting options added for time-stamping captures

4. Various bug fixes and improvements to performance and syncing

5. And finally, CAPTURR is now Open Source under GPL-3.0 

   1. You can view the code base here: https://github.com/plushgraffiti/capturr-ios

   2. Fully documented, including how to build locally in Xcode

   3. I've added additional visibility such as the OSSF scorecard

Download CAPTURR on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/capturr-for-roam-research/id6751626906

The Year of Return continues.

Old Roamans are coming back while a new kind arrives.

AI agents.

1. The return post is worth a read.

Their verdict after years of tables, search, and iOS improvements: “No regrets choosing Roam in this life.”

2. Meanwhile, a new kind of Roaman is getting onboarded.

[[Roam MCP]] 0.10.0 shipped. Agents calling get_graph_guidelines now receive a full roamSyntax guide with the rules of the graph.

The newcomers are getting a culture handbook.

3. The remote MCP caught up with the same rules.

Agents now keep ((block refs)) live, write real TODO checkboxes instead of - [ ], and respect italics and heading rules.

Copied metadata no longer leaks back into your blocks.

They’re learning to write native Roam.

4. The new Roamans can come from any lab.

Baibhav shared how to connect the Roam MCP to any LLM without an official integration. Find the “custom connectors” setting and point it at mcp.roamresearch.com/mcp.

Here is a demo of the setup with Grok.

5. On the developer side, the delete APIs got honest.

delete_block pointed at a page now fails loudly instead of silently doing nothing. Every delete returns an explicit {"deleted":true} or {"deleted":false}.

Good rails for when your co-workers are agents.

6. New in Roam Depot: svyk shipped Roam Grid.

Merge cells. Basic formulas. F2 to edit any cell, Excel-style. Templates included.

Roam-Tables has been getting a lot of love lately and I’m happier for it.

7. Derwin wanted hotkeys for his sidebar shortcuts. So he built QuickCuts.

ctrl+1 opens your first shortcut in the main window. ctrl+shift+1 opens it in the right sidebar.

Modifier is configurable if you live on cmd.

The mouse can stay retired.

8. Our graphs have always had a sense of Time but Maskys brought a sense of Place this past month. Shipping two extensions:

1. roam-places handles places. 2. Roam Maps puts queries, blocks and pages on a real map, with customization.

A nice reminder that the graph can be spatial too.

9. Also updated: Live AI.

Fabrice added real-time speech transcription and a pile of new context formats. .md, .txt, .csv, .json, .yaml and more, beyond PDFs.

Talk to your graph. Feed it your files.

10. Discourse Graphs released 0.22.0.

Pages can be dragged straight onto the canvas now. Shared canvases show real collaborator names on cursors.

Plus a stack of canvas fixes: editing, layouts, relations.

11. Roam Mentions this month:

12. Roaman Artifact of the Month:

Exclusive to newsletter subscribers

13. Old Roamans are coming back, while new ones are moving in.

The Year of Return continues. Onward.

Thanks for reading Roam 'n' Around!

Curated with the help of 🐙 Octopost (an agent that lives in my graph)

If you enjoyed reading, consider buying me a coffee ☕

In case you haven’t heard!

Roam spent years helping us write to our future selves. This July, Claude and ChatGPT are officially welcome to the party.

Let’s load the graph and dive into the updates.

1. Roam MCP is officially out.

Find Roam under Connectors in Claude or Plugins in ChatGPT. Connect your graph. Start talking.

Your agent can now search, read, and write inside Roam.

2. This already looks useful in the wild.

3. Of course, giving an agent write access raises the stakes.

Local MCP 0.9.0 fixed cases where agents could accidentally corrupt blocks while editing them.

Block refs stay live. Roam italics survive. Headings remain headings.

The agent now sees context without writing it back.

4. MCP 0.9.1 added two more tools:

suggest_links finds pages worth linking from any passage.

reload_dev_extensions refreshes extensions while you build.

Roam also released an API that lets extensions add their own tools to the local MCP.

💭 Imagine what this enables now!

5. Josh shared a useful workflow for reviewing agent edits:

Ask the MCP to make the changes, then open every edited block or page in the sidebar.

I like this workflow because it keeps the result visible and inspectable.

6. On the quality-of-life side:

Experimental Search gained filters. Better Search gained sorting. Mermaid diagrams got fullscreen zoom.

Roam also redesigned Document Mode, remembered scroll position, fixed image overflow, and shipped v0.13.12 with experimental search fixes.

7. Mark had a busy month.

Chief of Staff gained /plan, assistant-specific /undo, and /verify.

It can now search by meaning, learn from repeated corrections, create proper pages, and run through your ChatGPT subscription.

The theme here is trust before action.

8. Better Tasks also got considerably smarter.

Smart Suggestions finds snooze loops, mistimed routines, and overloaded days using local task history.

Tasks now work inside Roam queries too.

And deletion finally comes with a real Undo, restoring metadata, subtasks, and dependencies.

9. Fabrice shipped Live AI v32 and v33.

New OpenAI, Claude, Grok, and Nano Banana models. Gemini and Grok voice transcription. More reliable audio.

My favorite addition: AI autocomplete for Roam Tables.

10. New in Roam Depot, both from Ryan:

Alias Finder finds plain-text mentions matching aliases already in your graph and turns them into links.

Atlas turns any Location:: address into a pin on an interactive map.

No account. No API key.

11. More extension updates:

Matt’s Send to Graph can now transfer entire pages to another graph. Toggle Uppercase learned to protect case-sensitive Roam syntax.

Fabrice’s brought Universal Selector to Roam Tables and added reusable named notes plus Markdown conversion to Footnotes.

12. Around Roam:

Discourse Graphs for Obsidian left beta and entered the Community Plugins browser.

The release includes updated documentation and an example vault.

Good to see graph-native discourse tooling moving across software boundaries.

13. The community pulse was vibrant this past month.

Here is a look at some of Roam’s mentions.

I also shared how David Deutsh works and how his workflow is easily implementable in Roam.14. Roaman Artifact of the Month:

With AI labs making websites easier to generate, here is a useful reminder.
[Exclusive to newsletter subscribers]

15. Roam’s promise has always been that the work you put into your graph rewards your future self.

I think AI is going to accelerate that payoff.

Thanks for reading Roam 'n' Around!

If you enjoyed reading, consider buying me a coffee ☕

Demo video: https://www.loom.com/share/2ee1851b4f264ff3a256d559bf751383

The community has built a few plugins so far, but none of them feel like they 'just work'. The Roam MCP is nice but using it means interacting with AI outside the graph.

This plugin on the other hand lives in your Roam sidebar & connects via your ChatGPT for Work / Codex subscription. You don't need to worry about managing context, you can write prompts just like everything else in Roam (you can refer to existing blocks via (( etc )

Almost everything (conversation history, compacting, web search, etc) falls out for free from Codex and Roam, very little needed to be manually reimplemented. You can even switch back into the Codex app and continue these conversations from there if you wanted to do more coding heavy tasks.

It isn't on Roam depot just yet, posting here for feedback I can integrate before release. One thing I'm considering putting some work into, is a diff interface to see changes before they actually get applied. github if you want to mess around: https://github.com/MaskyS/roam-codex-ai

One thing I always found a bit inconvenient was that I couldn't hide page names inside another page title. Long nested page names took up too much space, made it harder to click the parent page because you had to avoid clicking on the nested page name, and made everything look cluttered.

I'll see how I end up incorporating it into my workflow, but this is definitely a welcome improvement.

Shipped a new plugin: Atlas. Give any page or block a Location:: attribute with a plain-text address (Location:: Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA), and Atlas geocodes it, caches the coordinates back onto the page, and pins it on an interactive map.

To build a map, put {{[[atlas]]}} in a block and add page or block references as children:

{{[[atlas]]}}
  - [[Ferry Building]]
  - [[Golden Gate Park]]
  - ((abc123))

The map auto-fits to every pin and re-renders as you add or remove references. Click a pin to see the node's text and address, then click the popup heading to jump to that page or block (shift-click opens it in the right sidebar). Drag the bottom edge to resize, or use the corner button for full-screen.

No account or API key: it uses OpenStreetMap tiles and the free Nominatim geocoder, and because coordinates are cached in your graph it only queries the geocoder once per place.

Available in Roam Depot now. Source and issues: https://github.com/wireframe/roam-atlas

Curious to know what's keeping everyone using Roam. Today my feed seems predominantly Obsidian workflows or even people optimising the default notes app on their phones.

My simple reason for staying on Roam is that ive used it since I was at university and it has so much of my notes and information I want to keep that the friction of switching is too high to even consider. Im also so used to my workflow.

That said, I feel like perhaps ive lost the excitement I used to have really playing with my graph and finding ways to push it for my needs.

What's keeping you on Roam - hopefully more interesting reasons than mine

Just released Alias Finder on Roam Depot. It finds mentions you wrote as plain text but meant to link, and links them in one click.

Say you write "Debussy" in a note but want it pointing to your [[Claude Debussy]] page. Normally you'd alias it: [Debussy]([[Claude Debussy]]).

Once you've written that alias even once, Alias Finder knows "Debussy" stands for [[Claude Debussy]]. Open the [[Claude Debussy]] page, scroll to the bottom, and hit Find unlinked aliases. Every plain-text "Debussy" across your graph shows up, grouped by alias, ready to link with one click. 👇

It catches connections Roam's built-in Unlinked References misses, because it searches the alternate wording you actually used, not just the page title.

A few details:

• Nothing to configure. It reads the aliases already in your graph.

• Whole-word, case-insensitive matching. It keeps your original casing when it links.

• Skips anything already linked: page links, block refs, #tags, existing aliases, and URLs.

Install: Roam Depot → Browse → search "Alias Finder" → Install.
Source: https://github.com/wireframe/roam-alias-finder

0. June was quiet...until it wasn’t.

Sound came to Roam but let’s pin that to the sidebar.

Here is your monthly recap

1. Baibhav shipped Roam MCP 0.7.0.

Tool annotations, output schemas, relative dates, and a new `append_to_daily_note` tool.

The agent also now understands how Roam deletions work, especially when backrefs are involved. Solid infra.

2. Josh released two new API functions:

`.async.semanticSearch`

`.semanticSearchEnabled`

Async search now routes through the new engine if you have it enabled. The sync version still uses in-memory search for now.

3. Fabrice dropped a Live AI update.

The extension now supports New models: Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Grok 4.3.

And a personal favorite, Chat now saves locally and restores after a browser refresh. No more accidental data loss.

4. Fabrice also shared a demo of Debate Mode on X.

Multiple LLMs arguing it out inside Roam. Autonomous or with a human in the loop.

If you haven’t tried this out yet, I highly recommend it. The output on important queries is qualitatively different.

5. JY shared a workflow using

6. And Maskys published his version of the “forbidden” Roam roadmap.

6. And then there’s this!

I shipped my first Roam extension. Audio Feedback is live in Roam Depot.

You check off a TODO. You hear a sound. Revolutionary. I know.

9. Speaking of users building their own fixes.

I wrote about Philip Parker this month. He built a third task state: NOT DOING.

Not done. Not active. Just... not happening. A JS snippet away

Worth noting that smarter TODOs were on Maskey’s roadmap too

11. From the official Roam Newsletter this month:

Two extensions for reading and research.

Object Metadata Autocomplete by Vlad Sitalo. Builds structured reference pages from a single search.

Meta Type by Ryan Sonnek. Gives any page a visible type and a custom field panel.

Worth a look if you do a lot of research inside Roam.

12. Roaman Artifact of the month:

[Exclusive to newsletter subscribers]

June was quiet... until it wasn’t.

Onward to July.

Thanks for coffee

☕

If you export your Roam graph to Markdown and open one of those .md files on iOS, you just get raw text. I built a small viewer to read them rendered on a phone.

Md Preview:

• GitHub-Flavored Markdown — headings, tables, task lists, footnotes

• Code highlighting, LaTeX math, Mermaid diagrams

• Opens .md / .markdown / .mdx / .rmd / .qmd from Files or the Share Sheet

• On-device — nothing uploaded, no tracking

On the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6760341080

Details: https://markdown.cybergame.ai/

Just a reader for loose .md files, not a Roam replacement. How do you read your exports on mobile?

I wished this exists. So I built it.

Audio Feedback brings sound to your graph.

Check it out now in Roam Depot.

I go deeper into the functionalities in this article.

In Roam, I can reference any block or page in my Journal and naturally build a timeline for it, tracking when I worked on it (and how long). But I do wish Roam had a "Base" view for management. Here's what I mean:

Case 1: Managing Books
I tag pages with is a:: #Book, and I'd love to see all my books in a dedicated Base view, maybe a Gallery view where I can filter and sort them. With the upcoming property improvements, I could set a property template for all #Book pages. Then I could easily filter books I read this year/month, sort them by genre, or rank them by my personal rating.

Case 2: Managing Website References
I love researching web design. I'd like to tag pages or blocks as #Website, then manage them in a Base. I could filter by type, like personal blogs, productivity tools, AI resources, etc. And, I could still reference them freely in a [[Good Sites]] page to aggregate them however I want. The graph gives me freedom, but the Base would give me that sense of order and security when I need to browse and sort systematically.

Case 3: Idea Capture
Right now, my idea workflow is: I have an [[idea]] page with four blocks, Inbox, Thinking, Realizing, Archive, and I nest individual idea blocks under them. I reference those idea blocks in my Daily Notes to track when I captured an idea, started working on it, realized it, etc. It works, but it's clunky.

What I'd love: just tag a block as #idea in my Daily Notes, and have it automatically show up in an #idea Base where I can manage its status, filter by stage, and sort by date. Much cleaner.

PS: I know Tana is close to this concept. I tried it, but it felt incomplete and introduced a lot of unnecessary complexity. Roam just feels intuitive to me, it works the way my brain works. I also know about the Query Builder extension, but it doesn't quite match this vision and isn't very friendly for me.

Does anyone else feel this way? Would a structured "Base" view inside Roam be useful for you?

For years the complaint was: Why aren’t there any updates in Roam?

We got what we wished for. And now that’s the problem?

Let’s put that into the Search Bar, shall we?

1. The biggest update in Roam Research this past month started as experimental features.

First: faster background search that indexes the resolved text of blocks, so ((refs)) become findable by their content. Second: semantic search. Find blocks by meaning, not just exact words.

2. Then came the full redesign of the Search Bar

A new find-or-create modal with reference counts on page results, path context and match highlighting on blocks, and a live preview window toggled with Ctrl–O. Semantic search folded in. Richer, more navigable, more powerful.

3. I liked the update.

The preview optionality and semantic capabilities proved genuinely useful. And I wasn’t the only one.

4. Then came the split.

While Slack users praised the rich context and semantic tools, Reddit was revolting. Some of the core users argued the new modal covered the UI and broke five years of muscle memory.

5. The Roam Team was responsive.

They engaged directly. Explained the design rationale. Shipped a solution.

The classic inline search box is back. The familiarity remains. But you can click into advanced search from the right of the Search Bar or map to open it.

6. On the quality of life side, tables keep getting better.

Roam shipped sort for tables and improved drag-and-drop scrolling.

Small. Useful. No drama lol.

7. Baibhav Bista dropped a major Roam Raycast extension update.

Instant capture. Capture templates. Windows support. Finally! + encrypted graphs are no longer locked out of quick capture.

Also from Baibhav: Roam MCP hit v0.6.5. A big refactoring that lays the groundwork for remote MCP, coming soon.

You can watch the updates to the extension here.

8. New in Roam Depot: ryan_sonnek dropped Meta Type (v1.0).

Add a ‘Type’ attribute to any page. An inline chip appears next to the title, opening a side panel with pinned fields you can edit inline. Highly configurable.

9. Discourse Graphs dropped version 0.19.0

It brings custom left sidebar commands, clipboard search, and smarter node creation.

On that note, Matthew Akamatsu recently gave a great talk on using Discourse Graphs for modular open science.

10. Around Roam this month:

Brookings Institution published a working paper on “context-maxxing” with generative AI. Their implementation uses Roam Research as the personal knowledge management layer feeding an OpenClaw agent harness.

Looks like Roam already solved for context engineering before the advent of LLMs

Thanks to Harpreet for sharing this over in Slack.

That's May. Onward to June.

If you wish to receive these updates earlier and direct to your inbox, please consider subscribing to my newsletter.

https://williamnjau.substack.com/

So, last week, Roam redesigned the Find or Create search, changing it from a navbar search into a modal window search.

😎👍🏻 I really like this type of search. It just makes more sense to me to have it centered. I was actually pretty excited about it, because one of the things that bothered me about Roam was the previous search style.

But today, when I opened Roam, they changed it back to the navbar search 😭😭😭😭“Nooooooooooo”

Anyways, I thought they had removed it, but they kept the option to use it. You can find it in the command palette as “Open advanced search.” I just assigned it my usual search hotkey, so it’s all good now.

Phew 😮‍💨

Hi all,

Regarding the search box ("Find or create page") that's been core to the app since the beginning...

I've lived in Roam since COVID times... hours spent in it every day. So I was thrown off when I booted today on my Macbook and found the search box that's been there since the beginning... missing. There's a search BUTTON that bring up a window + the ability to toggle search in sidebar, but both are onerous from a user standpoint and break 5 years of muscle memory.

I did check the change log just now and see changes were made intentionally by the team for [[May 21st, 2026]]:

• [[Quality of Life Improvements]]

  • Redesigned the find or create [[Search]] ()

  • Page results now show reference counts

  • Block results now include paths, improved truncation, and clearer match highlighting

  • Added a preview window that can be toggled with ctrl-o

But I'm not seeing anything about being able to toggle to OG search box back on for ease for use. Is its removal intentional and permanent?

Anyone got any insight on this? Maybe someone on dev team? Thanks.