Hi all,
I’ve used Roam for almost half a year now and I used block references very heavily. However, I played around with Obsidian a tiny bit and I liked how polished it is. I think that except for the lack of block references and a scratchpad, it fulfills almost all of my needs. Block references are really important to me, because people were quickly overlooking the power of block references, I made a quick video to showcase how I use them.
Here’s a review of Obsidian that I shared with my peers at Roam’s Slack
So I hope you can believe me when I say I’d really like to see a block references solution in Obsidian. I can leave the scratchpad feature aside.
While browsing this thread, I saw some clever solutions.
If I want to reference to a passage of text, I could just create a third page where the “block” lived and then reference it in both pages (the original one and the referer). Automating this via highlighting a passage of text and having a shortcut that will automatically create a page with a name that shows where it came from and copying the path to the clipboard would be fantastic (so that I can just go to the referer page and paste the reference).
However, the only issue left would be how embedding is displayed. In Roam, I can put a block reference inline with other annotations. In Obsidian, references take their own line and disrupt the outline of the page. If it was possible to choose to make an inline embed, it’d be great.