Thank you very much for your efforts of providing a self-hosted alternative to roam research and logseq. I am a roam user for 4 years now. Every year I tell myself to migrate to something else but this “something else” just never comes.
LogSeq would be the perfect replacement except they brag about it being open source but at the end of the day don’t want you to be able to host it yourself because then they can’t charge you 5 bucks per month for the syncing service.
SilverBullet seems to have everything I need: queries, bi-directional linking, possibility to write your own plugins…
The only thing that is missing is a way to use it as an outliner-only tool. I know that you can use bullet points but this is just not the same. I need it to behave just like roam. I need to be forced to organize my thoughts hierarchical which only true outliner-only tools can give me.
Is there any chance that this might happen in the future?
If it’s any consolation, I was exactly where you were not long ago. These days, with SB, I just take a moment to center my focus when opening a new page and type that first dash, and then I’m off into the outlining. (Note: I’m absolutely not trying to be funny or dismissive. I genuinely and vividly understand where you’re coming from.) There’s a way to change the default note template to start with that bullet, I know that’s not the solution you’re asking for, but, again speaking as someone who was desperate for an outliner tool, I’ve made peace with this solution because of how incredibly good Silverbullet and its community are.
Thank you. I appreciate the quick and comprehensive reply, really.
I just can’t do it without roam’s capabilities. I spent the last years to create my workflows and organization structure around roams outlines, attributes and tagging system. I can’t just go markdown.
Either way it’s an interesting project and, again, it’s good that people still care about note-taking and digital sovereignty. thank you.
I try to avoid explaining roam itself here. It is an outliner-first application. Everything is a bullet point, a “block”. When you use a hashtag or [[ you create what is called a page. pages are blocks too. every block is an actual entry in a database that you can later query through. With :: you create what is called an attribute which you can use to create even more granular queries. attributes are pages, too.
Also, being outline-only, when navigating to a specific block, you get the breadcrumbs from roam, the full path to the block, which lets you know the exact context of a piece of information within a second.
With this system you can create powerful hierarchical structures of information, todo’s, et cetera.
I guess I have to showcase my roam usage for people to really fully understand what I’m talking about. I guess my whole point is: there is no replacement for outliner-only. markdown can’t do that.
Ok, so, there are a couple of concepts overlapping here. I came from Logseq, which had many of the same features as Roam but was Markdown-based (until its recent swerve to a database model, which is the reason I left it behind). SB, in turn, is like someone took old Logseq and just … opened it up so all the behind-the-scenes stuff is accessible.
To me, what it sounds like you’re missing is the block-based addressing from both tools, not outliner functionality specifically. SB has, for example, keyboard shortcuts to move bullets around within an outline. Like Roam and Logseq, “When you use a hashtag or [[ you create what is called a page” (your words) is exactly how I use SB: I reach a new [[thought]] in whatever I’m #writing and link to it through brackets or a hashtag, creating the desired network of knowledge.
I would need to depend on people way, way, way more familiar with SB’s innards than I am to confirm and explain this, but it does appear to have some degree of context tracking: in my TODO search, the list of todos is referenced by date and a location (i.e., “2025-09-05@1060” which, when clicked, takes me to the correct location in the destination file where the TODO is defined). It may be that SB can do exactly what you need, possibly more, BUT Roam (and Logseq) take care of it for you, while SB exposes it for whatever you want to do.
I know you don’t want to explain your Roam workflow, but if you could characterize a couple of specific things you want to accomplish, it may be that (a) it’s there, just in a different way or (b) it’s a brief Lua script away (and this community will get you there).
SilverBullet works mostly with objects, which can be a To do-item, paragraph, data (fenced code blocks with a tag), links and a few more.
To all these objects you can add attributes (either plain #tags or [key: value] attributes) to make it easier to query them.
I think some of the functionality that seems to be missing should be possible to implement, but like flkiwi says it requires a deeper understanding of SB. One thing that I’m not sure if it exists is a ‘parent’ property. Many objects have a page property, so you know which page it’s one, but not the paragraphs or headings ‘in between’ the page and the object. If we have that information, then it would be easy to create breadcrumbs.
thank the both of you as well. I am pretty busy recently but as soon as I come to it, I’ll showcase exactly what I’m talking about. Either way I’m afraid it would require a major change in the SB code base.
@ramboe, I have a similar background and need (heavy Logseq user here).
I believe UI feature that simply disables paragraphs so that every line is necessarily a bullet would solve a huge part of what you're asking for.
Of course, SB is not fundamentally an outliner. This means that though it has a sense of hierarchy of your notes is, that sense is limited (so far). However, in practice, the work in this thread took care of a lot of the fundamentals I needed. YMMV.
Sure, but simply saying "I need it to behave just like roam" is impossible to work with. Instead, if you can bring it down to the specifics of the critical features and behaviors you need, it may be possible to bridge the gap.
Apart from breadcrumbs, the things you posted above are already in SB. What else is missing?
@Platinum so you want me to summarize a video that you don't watch into some text that you are not going to read either?
In the video I explain "the specifics" about everything SilverBullet should be able to do and why it should be able to do it in less than 15 minutes. In great detail. Video is the absolute best medium for that purpose. That's why I made a video.
If you just can't be bothered to watch it, honestly, never mind.
I was trying to help with your question. Video is fine for exposition, but written summaries are objectively more efficient for collaboration. Text lets people scan, search, quote, respond point-by-point, and skip directly to what’s relevant. It creates a shared artifact we can reason about. A 15-minute video forces linear consumption.
If the goal is serious technical discussion, text beats video every time.
And just to be clear I’m not going to inflate view counts just to extract basic information that could have been written in a few paragraphs. If you want engagement, meet people in the medium that enables it.
Let's not needlessly increase blood pressures here.
To answer the original question (from 6 months ago, but still): SilverBullet is markdown first. It deliberately starts with allowing anything: free form text, lists, tables, front matter, attributes, and then optionally putting in some more structure (folders, tags) and optional restrictions (I'm now adding some sort of schema support), but going all the way to saying "you can just put list items on a page" I don't see happening, really.
I see the appeal of a tool like that (LogSeq, Roam), but this wasn't the chosen path for SB and I don't really see that changing.
@zef, totally makes sense. However, I've always wondered if free-form markdown vs outliner is a false choice. It might well be possible to have both in a well designed system.
As flkiwi says:
Let me get my thoughts down better and get back on this larger topic.
Maybe, it depends on what the user's needs are. If they need a "hard block" (simply cannot do it) on writing a regular paragraph that's not in a bulleted item, then that's probably not something we're going to support.
