Last Updated on March 4, 2026
Foam is a personal knowledge management and sharing system inspired by Roam Research, built on Visual Studio Code and GitHub.
You can use Foam for organising your research, keeping re-discoverable notes, writing long-form content and, optionally, publishing it to the web.
This is free and open source software.
Foam doesn’t have features in the traditional sense. Out of the box, you have access to all features of VS Code.
Key Features
- Graph Visualization – see how your notes are connected via a graph with the Foam: Show Graph command.
- Link Autocompletion – create the connections between your notes, and your placeholders as well.
- Sync links on file rename – updates the links to renamed files, so your notes stay consistent.
- Unique identifiers across directories – supports files with the same name in multiple directories. It will use the minimum identifier required, and even report and help you fix existing ambiguous wikilinks.
- Link Preview and Navigation.
- Go to definition, Peek References.
- Navigation in Preview.
- Note embed – embed the content from other notes.
- Support for sections.
- Link Alias.
- Templates – use custom templates to have avoid repetitive work on your notes.
- Backlinks Panel – quickly check which notes are referencing the currently active note. See for each occurrence the context in which it lives, as well as a preview of the note.
- Tag Explorer Panel – tag your notes and navigate them with the Tag Explorer. Foam also supports hierarchical tags.
- Syntax highlighting, and more.
Website: foambubble.github.io
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Jani Eväkallio and contributors
License: MIT License
Foam is written in TypeScript. Learn TypeScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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| Foam | Personal knowledge management and sharing system |
| CodiMD | Realtime collaborative markdown notes taking inspiration from Hackpad |
| ProseMirror | Rich semantic content editor |
| CryptPad | Realtime collaborative editor |
| HedgeDoc | Create real-time collaborative markdown notes |
| Notes | Distraction free notes taking app for Nextcloud |
| Firepad | Full-featured text editor |
| Gobby | Supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |