Where am I? Highlighting the Scope in Roam

Pure CSS Way

Sometimes it may be difficult to find your way in a wall of bullets, based on an image by DarkmoonArt_de from Pixabay

One of the more confusing things in outliners is often to find where we are within the outline — in other words, the scope. There are different solutions for this, e.g., RemNote — one of the most interesting competitors of Roam — uses sticky headers.

RemNote’s sticky headers

We could imagine, of course, many different other solutions. E.g., breadcrumbs or simply highlighting the current active depth. Roam unfortunately lacks any of these features which makes it sometimes a little bit confusing to use.

There were multiple attempts to solve this problem. I definitely don’t know about all of them but I remember well attempts of Eran Boodnero. First, he created first a userscript called ScopeCue:

And later, he converted that into a fully-fledged browser extension called Roaman:

At that time, I was also trying to solve this issue and I even created a little script that worked reasonably well. Unfortunately, for some weird reasons, it was quite buggy in Firefox and so I have never released it:

My ancient attempts to highlight the scope.

Nevertheless, I plan to recreate it in the second version of my ROAMEXT plugin.

As you see, there are small differences between Eran’s approach and mine. I tried to highlight the scope in all length while his script was highlighting just the closest connections. Nevertheless, all these approaches had one thing in common: they require you to use an external…