Arrival Of Direct* Formatting** Into Roam: 3 Fascinating Use Cases

* Almost ** Requires a little bit of CSS

Give your Roam a little bit of colors

If we compare Roam to its competitors like RemNote (or, god forbid, Notion), there is one thing that stands out: Roam distinctively lacks direct formatting. You can use bold text, cursive, s̶t̶r̶i̶k̶e̶t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ and some other limited options but they first have to be rendered by the system. What do I mean by that? Look at these two short GIFs:

Direct formatting in RemNote

Now compare it to Roam:

Formatting in Roam uses so-called Markup — it disappears when we edit it directly

RemNote allows you to use bold font even if you edit the text. Roam, instead, uses the so-called markup language called Markdown. In other words, when you edit the block, you see **bold text** instead of bold text.

However, the largest advantage of Roam over almost any similar type of software is its flexibility. Thanks to the very clever design of the code (check my Ode to customization of Roam), its extremely active community can find solution for almost any problem. And if the…