# Foam Brain Starter Template

Foam is a tool that supports creating relationships between thoughts and information to help you think better.

Foam kitchen sink, showing a few of the key features

Whether you want to build a Second Brain or a Zettelkasten, write a book, or just get better at long-term learning, Foam can help you organise your thoughts if you follow these simple rules:

1. Create a single Foam workspace for all your knowledge and research following the Getting started guide.
2. Write your thoughts in markdown documents (I like to call them Bubbles, but that might be more than a little twee). These documents should be atomic: Put things that belong together into a single document, and limit its content to that single topic. source
3. Use Foam’s shortcuts and autocompletions to link your thoughts together with [[wikilinks]], and navigate between them to explore your knowledge graph.
4. Get an overview of your Foam workspace using a Graph Visualisation (⚠️ WIP), and discover relationships between your thoughts with the use of Backlinking

Foam is a like a bathtub: What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

To quickly get started with a new "foam brain" project I created a script that will create a new foam with a starter template

foam /var/www/zzz/projectFolder

Here is the script to expain what it does:

#!/bin/bash
clear;

```conf
 ___  __               __   __                      ___ 
|__  /  \  /\   |\/|  |__) |__)  /\  | |\ |   |\/| |__  
|    \__/ /~~\  |  | .|__) |  \ /~~\ | | \| . |  | |___ 

01000110    01001111    01000001    01001101    00101110 
01000010    01010010    01000001    01001001    01001110 
            00101110    01001101    01000101                                                         

echo "┌────────────────────────────────────────────────┐" echo "│ INSTRUCTIONS - NEW FOAM BAIN │ echo "│ foam [path to new foam brain] │ echo "│ │ echo "│ Example: │ echo "│ foam /var/www/zzz/newBrain │ echo "│ │ echo "│ The above example will create directory │ echo "│ mkdir -p /var/www/zzz/newBrain │ echo "│ cp /srv/scripts/foam/template/* /var/www/zzz/newBrain │ echo "│ cd /var/www/zzz/newBrain │ echo "│ │ echo "│ Then if you have code-server installled it will attempt │ echo "│ to open vscode in the new foam brain │ echo "└────────────────────────────────────────────────┘" echo " "; echo "ENTER THE FULL PATH OF NEW FOAM BRAIN"; read BRAIN_PATH;

echo "CONFIRM FOAM PATH: $BRAIN_PATH ? yn"; Do read "Confirm yn" echo case $yn in [Yy]* ) mkdir -p $BRAIN_PATH; cp /srv/scripts/foam/template/* $BRAIN_PATH/; cd $BRAIN_PATH; [Nn]* ) exit;;

* ) echo "Goodbye!";; break;;

esac

echo " "; echo " "; echo "by Charl Cronje - http://cv.webally.co.za"

Now the script must just be made executable:

```sh
chmod +x /srv/scripts/foam.sh

Create symbolic link to make the script global

ln -s /srv/scripts/foam.sh /usr/bin/foam