Contextual Backlinks, Stroll, and Stream

[Vaughn Papenhausen]

I think the thing that roam does that none of the competitors that have arisen can do yet is this: when backlink references are displayed, they display the entire subtree of the node that references the page. For example, if I have [[Page 1]] and [[Page 2]], and on Page 1 I write the following:

• stuff
• [[page 2]]
• more stuff
• even more stuff
• stuff stuff
• extra stuff
• stuff

Then on page 2 at the bottom the following will be displayed:

• [[page 2]]
• more stuff
• even more stuff
• stuff stuff

(Though with the stuff under the [[page 2]] node collapsed). This essentially allows writing to one page directly from another page. For example, I can link [[Page 2]] from my daily notes, and write everything I want to appear on Page 2 under that bullet, and it's as if I'm writing it on Page 2 (in fact the content is even editable from Page 2). This is what enables the sort of workflow Andy Matuschak describes here: https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/1190102757430063106, i.e. building up pages implicitly by linking to them a lot, even before they have anything properly on them. Even the contextual backlinks that Stroll provides don't allow for this level of automatic transclusion.

However, Saq's new Stream plugin might change this. I'm not sure how Stroll and Stream work under the hood. But if Stroll's backlinks feature had an option to essentially transclude the backlinks as a Stream, then precisely this functionality would be achieved. I don't have the technical chops to make this work right now, but I wanted to bring it to the attention of those who do (@David Gifford, @Saq), in case somebody wanted to do it at some point. In any case, I think the Stroll and Stream plugins are amazing already (thanks to Saq and David for all their hard work), and just wanted to point out this way in which they could be even more amazing if they were brought together.

[David Gifford]

Hi vrpape,

Thanks for the kind words.

Stroll displays under a tiddler, as a link or a transclusion, every tiddler that backlinks to that tiddler. So if one were to combine Stroll and Stream, if that can even be done (at the very least, at the moment, I know Stream breaks the auto-complete), any "node" (or line) in Stream that backlinks to a tiddler will display under the tiddler it backlinks to.

Keep in mind that EVERY node in Stream is a separate tiddler, so Stream is not for creating a huge "second brain" wiki. It looks like it will make more sense for smaller projects.

[OGNSYA]

I'm using Stroll with Stream.

Indeed autocomplete is currently not working.

Backlinks appear like David said. They're just transclusions, so they are not editable. Also, only the node is shown (ie., not in context).

I agree it would be extremely powerful to have the features mentioned by vrpape.

One thing I miss in TW core is an alternative way of transcluding a tiddler which shows it as a live editable tiddler, like Stream does for example. But even in Stream there's a limitation to this. For example, if I want a certain node to appear as editable in multiple tiddlers, I need to manually edit the stream field within a tiddler. It does work though, so perhaps it's a possible enhancement for that plugin.