Regular readers know that I’m very taken with the Zettelkasten idea and have implemented my own (sort of) Zettelkasten with Org-mode. My homegrown solution is not very featureful or convenient so I installed org-roam (a FOSS alternative to the popular Roam application) to provide myself with a “real Zettelkasten.” Sadly, I’ve been too busy (lazy, really) to configure it or figure out how to use it. That’s made me feel vaguely guilty.
Fortunately, abo-abo has come to the rescue with his own post on org-roam. I say, “come to the rescue” because he, too, spent a lot of time getting around to actually using it. He’s been using it for less than a month but already loves it and considers it an upgrade to his previous way of taking notes. Take a look at his post to see a comparison between his old and new methods.
Being abo-abo, he’s tweaked things a bit with some wrapper code but he gives a pointer to org-roam configuration so you can use it as a starting point. That’s exactly what I intend to do. On the one hand, I was happy to find out that I’m not the only one who’s been sitting on org-roam for months. On the other hand, abo-abo has inspired me to get moving on what I’m sure will be an improvement to my notetaking. Feel free to excoriate me in the comments if I don’t report some progress in the near future.
At the end of abo-abo’s post, he shows a nice trick for automating a search for notes needing further action using the listify-key-sequence command and unread-command-events variable. I didn’t know about that but will add it to my toolkit.