Payments are supposed to open today. I’d have hoped that there might be some more detailed and explicit statements about what you get for your money. Setting aside the customer satisfaction aspects of this, they must surely want to avoid the litigation risks of being unclear about what you do and do not get for your subscription.
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Well, after reading @Kourosh 's book about DEVONthink, I’m finally dedicated to give it a serious go, and so far I’m thoroughly impressed by what it can do. There are even a lot of AppleScripts on the forum that replicate many loved Roam features – namely backlinks. What you absolutely won’t get is transclusion but powerful internal linking features + infinite custom metadata for each file may be able to compensate for that.
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it would be interesting to see a list of apps (web or not) that actually support transclusion.
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Plus the ability to easily interact with other local apps, such as Bookends, iAWriter, Texpad, Hazel, what have you.
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Off the top of my head, “true” transclusion (inserting a document inside another) is very rare. I believe the only ones to do it that way are Roam and TiddlyWiki (maybe Dynalist?)
Those are the only two I know of as well.
Obsidian, 1Writer (iOS), and iA Writer (in a proprietary style) also provide it.
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It seems to me that Obsidian provides preview of the linked files, like Wikipedia does, but that’s not real Roam-like transclusion (documents nested inside others).
Sorry, I don’t follow—do you mean that being able to edit the document in the transcluded view is what you’re calling “true” transclusion?
Nope, not Dynalist.
Answering my own musing, transclusion is essential to the delivery of web services, so on the commercial or technical side, it is pervasive. In the wiki case, MediaWiki, DocuWiki and others support transclusion – and ordinary folk can find hosting services for these and others and thus achieve transclusion solutions.
For consumer software, desktop environments, there is more opportunity on the Windows side. ConnectedText, which sadly is no longer supported, is excellent and (as a personal wiki solution) supports transclusion well. So does InfoQube.
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(« True » is my own term, by no means do I mean there is true and fake transclusion 
)
What I mean is the ability to embed a document inside another which can then be opened / edited whether inside the parent document or on its own. All blocks in Roam can be referenced and edited independently, but also included anywhere transparently.
Thinking of it, Notion kind of does that as well, and should be added to the list.
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Agree re: Notion.
And I see. I think the distinction is valuable, although we’re straying into outliner territories, too. Workflowy probably has the feature as well? I haven’t used it.
There’s probably some nuanced distinction to be drawn between document-embedded transclusion, like iA Writer’s Content Blocks or Obsidian/1Writer’s previews, and outliner-traversal transclusion, like Roam. (Outlinely might offer it too, though I can’t recall. Damn that developer for half-baking, then abandoning, what might’ve been my favourite app!)
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This thread just reminded me this this blog hasn’t been updated in a long while - a bit Windows-centric but worth reading some of the back posts:
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I don’t get the focus on transclusion. Surely, if you can already embed a note inside a note, the ability to edit it there or follow a link and edit it is completely irrelevant?
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The idea, I think, is to have everything under your eyes in the same document and fold / unfold it at will, while being able to work in depth upon that part at other times without having everything else around you. Links can serve the same purpose, but are not as modular.
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Right. But as a developer, that would demand quite an advanced syncing engine. I mean, let’s say you have documents A and B, and both contain X as a module. If you edit X in A, and the switch to B and expect to see those changes… Well, I’m not adding features like that to anything I make, to put it that way. But then I don’t work with sync engines.
This has been around quite a while in different guises, anyone remember OLE in Windows? Embedding an Excel spreadsheet within a Word document, etc.
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Yes, and that was such a huge disaster that it’s taken until now for them to bring it back.
It’s just a really difficult problem, and it’s a complication I wouldn’t add unless I could help it.
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I think transclusion (developer challenge) is the coin flip side of versioning (customer challenge). Without option of transclusion, key text/content gets copy-paste repeated all over kingdom come. At the end of the day, any edits are (essentially) lost since there is no canonical source (without extreme discipline or conventions). This copy-paste approach flies in the face of a basic coder (and ideally writer) principle of DRY - Don’t Repeat Yourself (since repetition leads to a maintenance nightmare for coders). With transclusion (kind of like dynamic references in a spreadsheet), canonical text can be included wherever its needed, and edited (ideally) in-place anywhere, all the while maintaining the canonical source.
The ability to transclude permits writers to hone closer to the DRY principle (but is problematic for app programmers to implement).
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Except that you can still VIEW the contents as parts of other documents. That’s not a huge problem. Editing in several different contexts is the problem, since you then have to keep the contents in sync.
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