⚹ Foam

297 2026-07-24 bookmark

Foam is a VSCode extension for markdown-based personal knowledge bases: wikilinks, backlinks panel, graph visualization, orphan and placeholder panels. Read from the same flat src/notes/*.md files this site already builds from.

No server, no separate app, just an editor plugin that works alongside Eleventy InterlinkerObsidian-style wikilinks, backlinks, and embeds for Eleventy. Used for both dead-link reporting and stub-generation. The resolvingFns is why I use this instead of the lighter eleventy-plugin-backlinks alternative. It makes the hover-preview excerpts on wikilinks possible. The dead-link-to-stub pipeline is the….

Foam is for authoring: link autocomplete, go-to-definition, a live graph while writing.

The Eleventy build is for publishing: it turns dead links into stubA problem that wiki-linked digital garden run into is figuring out what happens when you reference a note that doesn't exist on disk yet. A traditional website would 404. This site turns it into a stub instead. A stub is… page via scripts/generate-stubs.mjs, and what renders the hover-preview excerpts described in TransclusionTransclusion is including a document's content inside another by reference, rather than by copy, so the excerpt is from the source. Don't repeat yourself! Ted Nelson coined the term decades before wiki software made it common; Gwern.net is the best-known….

Foam's own placeholder panel flags the dangling links for editing, but it doesn't write files.

Workspace config lives in .vscode/settings.json: foam.files.exclude keeps _site/, node_modules/, and src/inbox/ out of Foam's graph so it only ever sees the real note corpus, the same scope Static Site GeneratorsA static site generator takes markdown and templates and compiles them into plain HTML files with no server-side code and no database. For a digital garden that's meant to be worked on continuously, the boring reliability is a great asset.… describes for the build itself.