And searching within TheBrain and attachments is fabulous. ItвЂ™s also a great repository beyond the traditional hierarchical filesystem. I mostly use TheBrain for exploring, classifying and documenting domains of interest. Will try soon (but initially feels as a strange idea рџЋ).

HavenвЂ™t tried running Roam inside TheBrain. As you can imagine a lot has accumulated in TheBrain over the years, so I guess I'll be using both parallel for a long time. I have a tag in TheBrain 'Moved to Roam' which I use to mark thoughts that have been moved. I have not migrated my notes from TheBrain, I only move stuff when it comes up. With respect to the question do I use both: Yes. Regarding TheBrain 12, they have implemented some level of a text only view including navigating the plex through text, but it is far from a frictionless experience. In TheBrain you need to click a lot to get things done and there is no such thing as block level referencing. Finally the absolute killer feature of Roam is its frictionless experience and its block level referencing.With some hacking you can read the brain export, and even create your own, but it is not documented and TheBrain does not encourage such hacking. TheBrain was never good at giving users access to their data outside the GUI. roam/js and recently Roam42 are game changers. The huge benefit of Roam is its flexibility.

I miss lateral links (jumps) in Roam (of course you could argue that in a way all links and backlinks are all lateral links in Roam - in which case I miss the parent child links :)).

I love the plex in TheBrain (the graph overview in Roam is crap),.

I've used TheBrain for 18 years and have moved to Roam in May.

Thebrain 9 update