Minimal Theme for Roam Research

Roam Research is the leading light in a spate of emerging note-taking and thinking tools that aim to move beyond the constraints of traditional text documents.

This text renaissance is moving us towards new writing tools that better support the capturing, creation and sharing of human thought. Roam is en-route to implementing a near-full conception of hypertext as originally imagined by visionaries like Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson. Simply put, Roam allows easy referencing to blocks of text and introduces bidirectional links between pages and blocks of text. On the surface this might not sound like much, but a few sessions using the tool quickly illustrates why Roam’s early adopters are so cultish.

I’ve been playing with Roam on and off since December. This tearing up of the write -> structure -> organise -> refactor -> bundle/unbundle flow has had a marked change on how I write, how I think and how I remember.

This past month, I’ve re-committed to using Roam daily in place of Evernote and Bear. Being a sensitive snowflake, however, the UI bothered me. Roam recently, opened up the ability to customise the look and feel, so I created this design (below).

Double-pane view

The design intention is to be minimal, clear and to remove visual distractions introduced by backlinks, external links and bullet-guides. The design is geared around the two-pane view or two-pane view with sidebar.

Tags are designed to be visually unobtrusive and a secondary feature. The exception here is where tags are commonly used and actionable. Specifically, TODO, to read, to process, to write.

Single-pane view

Highlights are designed to be visible but not jarring and fit the colour scheme of the design.

The CSS can be found on GitHub here.

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