Parent and child Notes (Roam-like style)

[Ahmad]

Hi everyone,

I have been playing with Roam Research for a week just out of curiosity. I still like Obsidian over Roam, but that does not mean Roam does not have its own strengths. Obsidian suits my needs well. However, one feature I’ve found in Roam that is brilliant where child notes always follow their [[parent note]]. For example, when you start with a daily note, you do not have to think how to structure your notes or pages, just bring the parent note and start writing related notes as child underneath it. assume you bring the same [[parent note]] in the next daily and write some other child notes. Once you click the [[parent note]], all notes in different contexts will be shown up.

Honestly this is very powerful, especially for me who works in the Academia. I’m not sure if this can be done in Obsidian or if there is a plugin or workaround that allows such powerful feature. If yes, I would be grateful for the enlightenment.

[Archie]

I use foldernote plugin for such a functionality, but yes it is a good idea to implement such features in the core obsidian

[Dor]

Parental links are intrinsic to Roam because it’s an outliner. Obsidian sits on individual files, so all forms of linking are additional functions.
There has been much discussion, including feature requests iirc, about parental linking, especially in the zettelkasten threads. I’ve no idea of the current state of play with plugins, but it is something a plugin should be able to do.
The natural way of managing parental links with files is to use folders, but that would quickly get clunky. You could use a wikilink with a parental tag. There are all sorts of ways you could devise to do this, but it could never be as smooth as a program that’s an outliner at heart.
Each approach has its own strengths.

[Ahmad]

Thank you Archie. I’m not sure how the foldernote plugin would work as Roam-like outliner and its features. I would be grateful if give an example.

[Ahmad]

Thank you Dor

[Archie]

it basically ties an note to a folder so that when you move that note the whole folder with all the notes in it moves with it. you can use this system as a sort of outliner as the notes in the folder being as the child. I always make MOC notes to manage my notes and don’t use file explore much but this system helps with reorganizing notes when needed and fall back on it when getting confused.