Hi, I’ve been trying to figure out a good workflow for my org-roam notes, but I’ve been struggling to find a comfortable and effortless way to navigate through my notes.
Ideally I would be able to follow links and then easily move backwards with keyboard shortcuts. I personally find the default behaviour of opening up a new buffer when following a link to be disorienting, but I get the feeling that it’s because I’m not doing something right! So I’m curious to know how people browse their notes on a day-to-day basis.
org-roam-ui https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-ui is an excellent way to view notes, and remains live synced with your emacs navigation and note addition/alteration to the graph. It too has a side buffer for a quick note preview and supports following links within the notes as well as the direct click of a graph node for opening.
Lots of ways to do navigation. If you want the big picture, you look at the org-roam-ui graph. If you want all of a notes backlinks you look at the org-roam buffer. Besides that, your nodes should have (in my opinion) long and explanative names so you can search something and always find it. Org-roam-node-find has an excellent, customisable UI. There’s also counsel-rg which I use if I want to search for text in my zettelkasten and not titles which works better.
A tip to not get lost so easily is using winner-mode. When you follow a link and go to a new buffer, you read it, but then if you want to go back you should be able to use winner-undo to do so.
Lastly, as this isn’t ample for me in some cases (with the primary such example being revision for university lessons), I recently made my own package from traversing my zettelkasten and gathering the nodes I want to read at one time. You can check it here