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Adventures_in_org_mode

Lately I’ve been wanting to move away from obsidian.md and use something 1) open source and 2) not using electron. I settled on a
solution using org-roam on the desktop and logseq on my phone. This has
been my experience I’m documenting partially for myself but also for
the benefit of anyone who stumbles on this. ✨

Setup

Setup was a little more difficult than I’d like, but here’s what I
ended up with after trial and error.

  1. org-roam this package allows you to
    easily link notes to each other and create an obsidian-like graph of
    your org notes. it also can handle quite a lot of notes with ease

  2. consult-org-roam this
    package lets you harness the power of consult (which I should write
    an article on) to search for notes and search
    within objects which
    makes it extremely powerful

  3. org-noter this allows you
    to annotate documents (and even epubs thanks to

    nov.el mode!). While I haven’t
    used it a ton yet, I can already tell it’ll be
    very nice for
    anarchist theory readings :P

  4. org-modern this makes org
    mode pretty like obsidian (adds unicode bullets, boxes for scheduled
    tasks and more)

Workflow

Like roam, org-roam emphasizes permanent notes and fleeting notes,
usually in the form of daily notes. Here’s a typical daily note.

emacs open on an org mode buffer with a few todo list items, a journal
entry about hanging out with my friend and laundry and some cool links i
found today

Things I’ve learned

Org-mode isn’t just a markdown replacement, it’s a lot of things: a
knowledge management system, a todo and agenda manager, a jupyter labs
replacement, and probably more I haven’t even learned. Org roam
especially is very powerful especially when you set keybindings

(general-nmap
  :prefix "SPC o"
  "" '(nil :which-key "org-mode")
  "a" 'org-agenda
  "l" 'org-roam-buffer-toggle
  "f" 'org-roam-node-find
  "g" 'org-roam-graph
  "i" 'org-roam-node-insert
  "c" 'org-roam-capture
  "j" 'org-roam-dailies-capture-today
  "s" 'consult-org-roam-search)
(setq org-roam-dailies-capture-templates
         (let ((head "#+title: %<%Y-%m-%d (%A)>\n#+startup: showall\n* [/] Do Today\n* [/]\n"))
           `(("d" "default" entry
              "* %?"
              :target (file+head "%<%Y-%m-%d>.org"
                                 "#+title: %<%Y-%m-%d>\n#+filetags :daily:\n"))
             ("t" "do today" item
              "TODO "
              :file-name "daily/%<%Y-%m-%d>"
              :if-new (file+head "%<%Y-%m-%d>.org" "#+title: %<%Y-%m-%d>\n#+filetags :daily:\n")
              :head ,head
              :olp ("Do Today")
              :immediate-finish t))))

with keybindings and capture templates, org mode becomes not only an
amazing text editor (with evil :P), but also a todo list manager and
obsidian replacement/knowledge management system. I’ll likely update
this article as I learn more about org mode but that’s all for now!