Comment by onyva | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onyva | Hacker News Reader

I stopped using it once I discovered org-roam. It’s not a perfect replica, but manipulating text in a text editor is basic. Web based solutions can not compete, neither with speed nor the flexibility of an open source project, at least in Emacs’ ecosystem with org and everything else.

Most importantly offline first approach. My notes are stored on a NextCloud share so many backups and notes are searchable with ripgrep when looking for stuff not interlinked or tagged.

Also roam research used to mess up quite often until they built client side caching. Still very annoying and frustrating to have to look at the dot turning green or staying brown. Could have improved but they should offer a complete offline solution IMHO, at least for editing markdown in 3rd party tools and re syncing.

What's the main attraction of org-roam over org? I had a look at it, but didn't quite understand how to use it. Seemed as if it wanted one file per note.

It’s up to you. Make it work according to how you prefer to organize your notes. I dont follow the Zettelkasten system. I create notes per category or tag under which i can look for backlinks into related material. But otherwise I just use is to store everything, including lecture notes, vocabulary and full text of articles or lectures I consider important.

There’s a graph server that might be helpful but I never used it.

Another advantage being able to ripgrep through content for dirty searches.

The more content is there (not just links and pointers) the more likely it is you’ll surprise yourself finding links between different domains you’re interested in.

For me, word definitions in Arabic for example, tie into terminology used in articles I read in other languages, because I can use “aliases” to refer back to them.

The only thing missing for me is the ability to embed content. Ie have a paragraph embedded into the flow of other documents, which I can view or edit in either places.

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