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foambubble
foam
TypeScript2020–2025
foambubble / foam

foam

A personal knowledge management and sharing system for VSCode

36Distinct people
41Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
17.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A personal knowledge management and sharing system for VSCode

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year41 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-06-28 05:41:56 UTC to 2025-06-04 22:57:08 UTC.

0510152020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 1 submissions, 12 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 1 submissions, 9 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 0 submissions, 9 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC13112
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1019
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC909
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Foam Foam is a personal knowledge management and sharing system built on Visual Studio Code and GitHub. You can use Foam for organising your research, keeping re-discoverable notes, writing long-form content and, optionally, publishing it to the web. Foam is free, open source, and extremely extensible to suit your personal workflow. You own the information you create with Foam, and you're free to share it, and collaborate on it with anyone you want. Features Graph Visualization See how your notes are connected via a graph with the Foam: Show Graph command. Link Autocompletion Foam helps you create the connections between your notes, and your placeholders as well. Sync links on file rename Foam updates the links to renamed files, so your notes stay consistent. Unique identifiers across directories Foam supports files with the same name in multiple directories. It will use the minimum identifier required, and even report and help you fix existing ambiguous wikilinks. Link Preview and Navigation Go to definition, Peek References See where a note is being referenced in your knowledge base. Navigation in Preview Navigate your rendered notes in the VS Code preview panel. Note embed Embed the content from other notes. Support for sections Foam supports autocompletion, navigation, embedding and diagnostics for note sections. Just use the standard wiki syntax of [[resource#Section Title]]. Link Alias Foam supports link aliasing, so you can have a [[wikilink]], or a [[wikilink|alias]]. Templates Use custom templates to have avoid repetitve work on your notes. Backlinks Panel Quickly check which notes are referencing the currently active note. See for each occurrence the context in which it lives, as well as a preview of the note. Tag Explorer Panel Tag your notes and navigate them with the Tag Explorer. Foam also supports hierarchical tags. Orphans and Placeholder Panels Orphans are notes that have no inbound nor outbound links. Placeholders are dangling links, or notes without content. Keep them under control, and your knowledge base in a better state, by using this panel. Syntax highlight Foam highlights wikilinks and placeholder differently, to help you visualize your knowledge base. Daily note Create a journal with daily notes. Generate references for your wikilinks Create markdown references for [[wikilinks]], to use your notes in a non-Foam workspace. With references you can also make your notes navigable both in GitHub UI as well as GitHub Pages. Commands Explore your knowledge base with the Foam: Open Random Note command Access your daily note with the Foam: Open Daily Note command Create a new note with the Foam: Create New Note command This becomes very powerful when combined with note templates and the Foam: Create New Note from Template command See your workspace as a connected graph with the Foam: Show Graph command Recipes People use Foam in different ways for different use cases, check out the recipes page for inspiration! Getting started Already using Obsidian? An Obsidian vault is usually already a Foam workspace — see Coming from Obsidian. Whether you want to build a Second Brain or a Zettelkasten, write a book, or just get better at long-term learning, Foam can help you organise your thoughts if you follow these simple rules: Create a single Foam workspace for all your knowledge and research following the [[Getting started]] guide. Write your thoughts in markdown documents (I like to call them Bubbles, but that might be more than a little twee). These documents should be atomic: Put things that belong together into a single document, and limit its content to that single topic. (source) Use Foam's shortcuts and autocompletions to link your thoughts together with [[wikilinks]], and navigate between them to explore your knowledge graph. Get an overview of your Foam workspace using the [[Graph Visualisation]], and discover relationships between your thoughts with the use of [Backlinking]. You can also use our Foam template: Log in on your GitHub account. Create a GitHub repository from foam-template. If you want to keep your thoughts to yourself, remember to set the repository private. Clone the repository and open it in VS Code. When prompted to install recommended extensions, click Install all (or Show Recommendations if you want to review and install them one by one). This will also install Foam, but if you already have it installed, that's ok, just make sure you're up to date on the latest version. Requirements High tolerance for alpha-grade software. Foam is still a Work in Progress. Rest assured it will never lock you in, nor compromise your files, but sometimes some features might break ;) Known Issues See the issues on our GitHub repo ;) Release Notes See the CHANGELOG. Learn more Head over to the 👉Foam documentation site to see Foam in action and read the rest of the documentation! Quick links to next documentation sections Foam homepage Getting started Features Recipes Frequently Asked Questions You can also browse the docs folder. License Foam is licensed under the MIT license. Contribution Guide See the Contribution Guide Code of conduct See the Code of Conduct Contributors ✨ Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key): Jani Eväkallio 💻 📖 Joe Previte 💻 📖 Riccardo 💻 📖 Janne Ojanaho 💻 📖 Paul Shen 📖 coffenbacher 📖 Mathieu Dutour 📖 Michael Hansen 📖 David Nadlinger 📖 Fernando 📖 Juan Gonzalez 📖 Louie Christie 📖 Sandro 📖 Simon Knott 📖 Steven 📖 Tim 📖 Saurav Khdoolia 📖 Ankit Tiwari 📖 ⚠️ 💻 Ayush Baweja 📖 TaiChi-IO 📖 Juan F Gonzalez 📖 Sanket Dasgupta 📖 💻 Nicholas Stafie 📖 Francis Hamel 💻 digiguru 💻 📖 CHIRAG SINGHAL 💻 Jonathan Carter 📖 Julian Elve 📖 Thomas Koppelaar 💬 💻 📓 Akshay 💻
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

41 sources
I recently made a list of note-taking apps and PKMs and I'm working on my own now (I'm a foam user but it's hard to recommend with all my add-ons and hacks which are a heavy lift to set up). The list: - [Roam](https://roamresearch.com/) - [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/) - [Saga](https://saga.so/) - [Notion](https://notion.so/) - [Day One](https://dayoneapp.com/) - [Notepack](https://github.com/Ogefest/Notepack) - [LogSeq](https://logseq.com/) - [Noteplan](https://noteplan.co/) - [Slite](https://slite.com/) - [Dendron](https://www.dendron.so/) - [Foam](https://github.com/foambubble/foam) - [Anytype](https://download.anytype.io/) - [OneNote](https://www.onenote.com/signin?wdorigin=ondc) - [Evernote](https://evernote.com/) - [Notabase](https://notabase.io/) - [Joplin](https://j
Read the rest
oplinapp.org/) - [Ulysses](https://ulysses.app/) Please suggest additions if you have them.
In The cult of the Obsidian note-taking app
I started using Foam[0] a few years ago, but the more I used it, the more I dropped all the tedious bits, and it became nothing more than a big, evolving markdown repo. I switched from vscode (back) to vim, and it has worked as well or better than it did before. I follow my own rules. I like the Zettelkasten idea of one idea per card, but if I put more related things in the same .md file, that's OK. I didn't like the flat directory structure, and so I have dirs organized by category. My /bar directory is inside my /cooking directory, and for whatever reason, that makes sense to me. Ripgrep doesn't care, and I always find what I'm looking for. This markdown hierarchy, that still lives in a repo called "foam", has become indispensable to me. [0] https://github.com/foambubble/foam
In Ask HN: How Do You Utilize Your Personal Knowledge Base?
From recent threads, the top contenders for self-hosted are: - https://github.com/laurent22/joplin - https://github.com/logseq/logseq - https://github.com/zadam/trilium There is also https://github.com/foambubble/foam mentioned, which I haven't looked properly at yet. For managed/hosted, those all have some variety of options for that. Also https://obsidian.md/, https://www.notion.so/notes, https://roamresearch.com, and OneNote.
In Evernote has laid off most of its US staff and will move operations to Europe
Since the data store is markdown and can be synced with Git, you can already work with an Obsidian vault using Foam in VSCode. I do. Workflow: PKM in Obsidian, move ready docs to designated docs folder tree, sync w/ git to shared docs site repo, two-way collaborate w/ colleagues on docs. You do need to align some options in each, such as file naming, a header, a particular style of links, and ensure frontmatter behavior. All necessary settings exist. https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ https://github.com/foambubble/foam/issues/46 This supports basic static file and links functionality, not extended data tools etc., of course.
In Silver Bullet: Markdown-based extensible open source personal knowledge platform
In terms of the commenter here talking about "tools emerging after the two dark age decades of style over semantics" wikis don't count as new development. ;) Even Wikipedia is more than 20 years old. And I think wikis are still quite limited in that bit I quoted: "Englebert is not advocating that we perform artificial acts with documents by superimposing structure on them. Instead, he advocates that we capture the inherent structure in all forms of human expression in order to make them easier for people to navigate through, view in different ways, and hyperlink." They have hyperlinks, sure, but otherwise most pages in wikis have only those views that can be created through operations on a hierarchical table of contents. The structure is imposed by the tech, there, rather than the expression of knowledge itself. The blocks in Roam - https
Read the rest
://thinkstack.club/how-to-use-roam-block-reference-menu... - seems like a major iteration on that to me in terms of moving towards units of knowledge as the fundamental element instead of "pages." (It's also worth noting that Foam doesn't do this - https://github.com/foambubble/foam/issues/294 - though apparently Obsidian does.)
In Doug Engelbart’s design for knowledge-based organizations (1992) [pdf]
I read this as a prophecy of Foam (https://github.com/foambubble/foam), Obsidian.md (https://obsidian.md/), and the like. See this thread on Foam from 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23666950 Despite ”design for knowledge based organizations” being the title of the article in the PDF, this is perhaps more about approach and capabilities for organizing flow from capture to use to pruning of knowledge, more than the organizations working on knowledge. There is one aside about the organization itself: > Engelbart sees every organization as a collection of interacting knowledge domains. He has focused his research on designing support structures for knowledge collection and refinementwithin and across these knowledge domains. But then that jumps down into a given domain, and goes on to propose a knowledge management approach withi
Read the rest
n that (and each) domain. This is where it gets interestingly predictive of the recent coalescence in knowledge management tools emerging after the two dark age decades of style over semantics. The first idea is a concept of bringing knowledge in, working it, and keeping it. He calls this Concurrent Development, Integration, and Application of Knowledge (CODIAK) process. To make this workable he proposes a time-relevance layered approach very similar to the (perhaps easier to action) “PARA” method adopted by many KM tool users today: https://fortelabs.com/para After this, he goes into functional implications, and describes almost to a T capabilities in the latest round of knowledge management tooling “systems” such as, say, Obsidian.md, built on standards (markdown, wikilinks, front matter) and extensibility enabling journaling, querying, views, as first class citizens. When hypertext markup iterated into a page style description advertorial tool rather than linked semantic knowledge structure, that left an opening for the tools we’re seeing now. Today, Obsidian.md is close to the mark, except, of course, for approachability by casuals. For casuals, consider e.g. Craft.do (https://www.craft.do/). If you’re doing a comparison before jumping in, it’s worth diffing the tools against Englebart’s take. I’d argue he’s dead on.
In Doug Engelbart’s design for knowledge-based organizations (1992) [pdf]

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