A second brain made of plain text files.
Markdown on disk, links and backlinks, encrypted sync you can turn off. Works offline. Scriptable. Yours.
---
title: Working memory
created: 2026-09-01
tags: [cognition, reading]
---
Miller's "seven plus or minus two" is mostly folklore now.
Cowan (2001) puts the practical limit closer to four chunks,
which is why long outlines stop working past the fourth level.
Related: [[Chunking]], [[Why outlines fail]]This is a note. All of it.
One file per note. Front matter for metadata, wiki-links for connections. Open it in any editor, grep it, commit it to git. If Loam disappeared tomorrow, your notes would not.
Built for the part where you come back to it.
Capture from anywhere
Share sheet, browser clipper, a forwarded email, a voice memo. Everything lands in one inbox as a note.
Link as you write
Type two brackets to link any note. Backlinks appear on their own, so old thinking attaches itself to new.
Search that understands
Full-text and meaning-based search across notes, PDFs and web clips. Ask for the idea, not the exact words.
Old notes come back
Each morning Loam surfaces three notes related to what you wrote yesterday. Nothing to schedule, nothing to tag.
How a note travels
- Capture
- A thought, a page, a paragraph from a PDF. Two seconds, from any device.
- Link
- Connect it to what you already know while it is still fresh, or let backlinks do it later.
- Resurface
- Loam brings the right note back when you are working on something related.
“Plain files on disk and sync that just works. I have nothing left to complain about, which is rare for me.”
“Six years of notes migrated in an afternoon. Backlinks intact.”
Free on your machine. Eight dollars to sync it.
Personal
Free
Local notes on one device, for as long as you like.
- Unlimited notes
- Markdown files on disk
- Backlinks and graph
- Full-text search
Sync
$8 per month
Every device, encrypted, with the clipper and resurfacing.
- Everything in Personal
- End-to-end encrypted sync
- Browser clipper and email-in
- Meaning-based search
- Morning resurfacing