Hacker News Reader

Comment by lvh | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have any research or experience with using "personal" systems like these as a team? I've always seen them described as having a single user, but many of the links seem like they'd be just as powerful for a (maybe small, maybe tightly-knit) team.

View on HN

I've used RoamResearch in small groups, and it works well. Just don't try to edit the same block simultaneously (last one wins).

If anyone has successfully done something similar with org-roam, I'd love to hear about it. I've never been on a team that would even consider it, given the Emacs learning curve. That said, I recently helped a Vim + Bear user switch to Doom Emacs + org-roam, and he was swimming in days.

Is anyone aware of projects to diff / merge content in collaborative knowledge graphs like these?

org-roam is great for personal use, but it’s not quite yet ready for team use. It kind of breaks when synced across multiple computers likely because it stores absolute paths in a sqlite database.

Author here. You can move the sqlite database to a separate location by setting a variable, and that should resolve the syncing issues. I do this and have the files synced via Dropbox across my different machines.

I tried storing the db in a shared Syncthing directory, but I had to make sure I only had one copy of Emacs running on any given machine. I of course couldn't do that so I would get conflicts with the db file and have to manually clean it up. Did I miss something?

IIUC, the SQLite database is just an index, and can be rebuilt from the underlying data which makes this approach possible. Is that right?

Yep, that's right!

Thanks, this is exactly what I needed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com