Connect: Building Interconnected Knowledge Graphs with Foam and Cursor
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A folder full of Markdown notes often feels disconnected. Links between files are just plain text, making it impossible to navigate your thoughts or see how ideas relate to one another. This lesson demonstrates a powerful solution: the "Foam" extension for VS Code and its forks, like Cursor.
Foam instantly supercharges your Markdown workflow by adding features inspired by Zettelkasten and Roam Research. It turns your simple folder of files into a cohesive, navigable knowledge base.
This lesson shows you how to:
- Install and use the Foam extension to enable clickable wikilinks and hover previews.
- Visualize your entire knowledge base with an interactive graph view to discover connections.
- Combine Foam's organizational power with Cursor's AI by opening your knowledge base in a dedicated workspace.
- Use AI agents to perform high-level tasks like refactoring, consolidating, and cleaning up your entire collection of notes.
By the end, you'll have a streamlined system for not only capturing and connecting knowledge but also for using AI to manage and maintain it effortlessly.
Prompts
The next thing I want to work on is sharing scripts between users.
Please scan through my lessons learned directory. Look through all the files in there. If there's any duplicates, please consolidate and compact them into smaller files and just do a general cleanup pass through our entire lessons learned directory.
Commands
cursor memories
[00:00] Now you'll notice in a lot of the memories that you've captured there's links to other files, but there's really no way for you to navigate to them. You can fix that by installing an extension called Foam, which allows you to manage markdown knowledge bases inside of VS Code and its various forks. So now with this installed, if I just reopen this file, I can now command click on this and jump over to it and hover over each of these and jump around. And if you want to leverage all of Foam's features, if you just open cursor, we'll clear this out, open cursor to the memories directory. Now if we run a command like foam new note, and we'll just title this next steps, then I can take a note the next thing I want to work on is sharing scripts between users.
[00:47] Or we can have foam show graph to see how everything links together. Like clear out everything here you can see we can zoom in on nodes and how things are connected. So if you want to be completely knowledge focused you can navigate this way, jump around, clean things up. And then if you open your agent, because we're now isolated to the memories directory, you can say things like please scan through my lessons learned directory, look through all the files in there, if there's any duplicates please consolidate and compact them into smaller files, and just do a general cleanup pass through our entire lessons learned directory, and then just let this go to work on cleaning up some of the memories, see what it recommends, and use built-in agents to help manage your knowledge as it grows.