Thread by @RobertHaisfield

If you’re great at queries and can constrain yourself to having certain canonical blocks for a concept, you technically could use block references instead of page references. The trade off is that filters would be harder to use since you can only filter by page refs @RoamResearch

If I were to do that, then all of my most important notes would just come with certain text in the block to make it easy to autocomplete. For example, all of my open questions have “open question” in the text of the block so that ((autocomplete is searchable.

https://twitter.com/roberthaisfield/status/1347570072517185536

What’s nice about this approach is that it gives you autocomplete but for whole thoughts, whereas it’s cumbersome to put more than a sentence into a page name. Actually, I might do this with my “evergreen note titles” too... use them as block refs for more robust autocomplete

If you want to use blocks at that atomic of a level while also using them as an organizational layer for your notes, then the words within the block are key for resurfacing via autocomplete. In the example above, I instantly filter down everything by writing in ((open question))

The magic comes then from combining keyword/key phrase level page references with block references here. The main blocks of interest are embedded within block hierarchies with page refs that make them resurfaceable... allows you to find things even when words aren’t in the blocks

Just as a reminder- you can query block references just like you can query page refs. For queries, all that matters is easy autocomplete to pull up what you’re looking for. QT shows an example. I’ll query a block ref to a specific open question all of the time.

https://twitter.com/roberthaisfield/status/1350199749970784258

The biggest obstacle to using block references as more verbose page refs is that, if you just think out loud in Roam, you’re way more likely to end up with many blocks that say the same thing vs. many pages that refer to the same idea. So which of the “duplicates” do you query?

That’s a big reason why I still recommend using page references for keywords or terse statements. It’s just easier to avoid duplication that way. It’s most likely true that you’ll have way more blocks than pages, so page refs let you have a smaller selection to autocomplete from

There’s a lot of literature on autocomplete. @worrydream says that brevity is irrelevant in an environment with good autocomplete. That’s why placing keywords in the core blocks you want to reference is important- lets you use verbosity to your advantage to filter down easily.

Roam could enable this further (cc @thepericulum) with advanced search terms with (()) inline searches. For example ((open question -resolved)). Or making that possible in the search bar, with a keyboard shortcut to paste selected page or block ref to your cursor

I found this block by searching ((quote Javier)).

Reminder: zoom in on a block (ctrl+o) to filter block refs, but you can only filter by page refs, not block refs. Queries remove those limits. This is why my advice in this thread doesn’t apply if you rely on filters over queries