Roam Research Templates

Questions and Help
1

I try to make a template for page references in Roam Research, but it doesn't work. Whenever I try to insert indented pieces of text, it doesn't create an indent in Roam. Please help :slight_smile:

1 Like
2

Hi, and welcome to the forum! :slight_smile:

Could you tell us a bit more about Roam and the spacing issue. Do spaces have special significance in the output there?

3

This is an issue that has tempted me to go back to Text Blaze and no other text expansion app is able to get this right. TextExpander cannot clean up the abbreviation after pasting.
The app is here: https://roamresearch.com. I can provide an account for you to use if you want to test it out. Notionally it uses markdown, but it doesn't seem as simple as using plain text.
If you get this right, there's a great opportunity with many of these apps now coming on like and not having template functions.

4

@Tobias_Brunnbauer - Can you get me an invite please? Maybe I can figure something out.

5

Not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for (you mention a template for "page references" - but I'm unclear exactly what that means - is your issue specific to this, or indents in general?). This is an example of my Daily Notes template, and the indents work for just fine for me, using {key:tab}.

FWIW, I'm on Linux using Brave Browser.

Retrospective{key:enter}{key:tab}One week ago: [[{time: MMMM Do, YYYY; shift=-1W}]]{key:enter}One month ago: [[{time: MMMM Do, YYYY; shift=-1M}]]{key:enter}Three months ago: [[{time: MMMM Do, YYYY; shift=-3M}]]{key:enter}{key:enter}Morning Journal{key:enter}{key:tab}[[What are you grateful for?]]{key:enter}[[Daily Affirmations]]{key:enter}[[One good thing]]{key:enter}[[One thing to work on]]{key:enter}{key:enter}Wellness{key:enter}Reading{key:enter}Writing{{word-count}}{key:enter}Watching{key:enter}Miscellaneous

Here's a simpler one, just for illustration regarding indentation:
Main Block{key:enter}{key:tab}First indented block{key:enter}{key:tab}Second indented block{key:enter}Same indentation level{key:enter}{key:enter}Back to first indentation level

4 Likes
6

Jimmy's approach seems to work for me. To summarize combine the enter and tab key commands like so:

Line 1{key:enter}{key:tab}Indented Line 2

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7

That works well.

I wonder about markdown, though.

### Heading

doesn't seem to work.

8

Does Roam support Markdown headings? I couldn't trigger one when typing normally.

This works though for inline Markdown formatting:

plain **bolded**{key:enter}

2 Likes
9

Yes it does. Strangely, markdown headings in Roam works in TextExpander, but not the kind of template created by @Jimmy_Jamboree. Plus TextExpander doesn't clean up the abbreviation asText Blaze does.

10

As Luhmann notes on this Roam Research Support page, "Headers can only be triggered through a keyboard shortcut or by using the contextual menu." Luhmann has put in a request to enable Markdown code for styling, as it is for bold, italics, etc.

In the meantime, to get headers to work in Text Blaze, one need only make use of the modifiers in the manner indicated above by Jimmy and Scott, that is,

{key:cmd-alt-1} Retrospective

or {key:cmd-alt-2} or {key:cmd-alt-3}, depending on which header you'd like.

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