[funnygrass]

IMO "easy" linking to other pages should be doable, but part of Roam's power is creating those pages by just making the link.

The linked references block I think could be extremely powerful in Notion. Bidirectional linking helps to associate data better than anything else I know, and if that can be handled semi-automatically it would blow people's minds.

Also, yeah, opening other pages in a sidebar would be amazing for being able to reference data without context switching and literally losing sight of what you're working on.

Personally, I'm using Notion for structured data, and Roam for unstructured, freely associated data. They're both pretty awesome in their own ways.

[Jaruzel]

> but part of Roam's power is creating those pages by just making the link

This is exactly how MediaWiki (and clones) have been doing it for years.

[jackbaty]

Not exactly. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in MediaWiki (and others), you need to click the link, (optionally) type some text, and hit "Save" or the page doesn't actually exist yet.

With Roam, the page is automatically just there when it's mentioned. A subtle difference but I'm finding it quite useful.

[gexla]

> Also, yeah, opening other pages in a sidebar would be amazing for being able to reference data without context switching and literally losing sight of what you're working on.

Can't you already do this? For example, if you right click on a title of a page, you get an option for "open in side bar." Then if you navigate to another page in the main pane, the sidebar still stays at the page you opened there.

[waterbadger]

You can also shift-click on links to open in them in the sidebar

[conaws]

Or control-shift-O when cursor is hovering over a link to open page or referenced paragraph/subtree (block) in sidebar.