I’m new to Emacs, Org, and Org-roam, but have begun to experiment and have everything up and running through Spacemacs on my MacBook Pro. Really getting into it and learning a lot.
I’ve been using Obsidian Notes, which behaves the same way as Roam and Org-roam–links, backlinks, etc.
Just to see what would happen … I copied my Obsidian note files into my Org-roam directory and changed their extension to .org. Of course, they open fine and links show up. However, clicking on the links does what you’d expect it to do–opens Org-capture instead of the target note. Backlinks aren’t recognized, of course, either.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to “import” these notes into Org-roam so that links and backlinks work correctly?
Obsidian uses markdown files (GitHub Flavored Markdown, GFM); Org-roam uses org files.
So you would need to bridge them.
One way to do this is to use a tool to convert .md files to .org files. A Roam migration tool is mentioned in the Org-roam official documentation; I have tried it on Windows. Since Roam exports into .md files, this tool should be useful for Obsidian.
You should also be able to use Pandoc to convert from .md to .org files.
Lastly… For markdown files, I use my unofficial plug-in for Org-roam that enables it to directly work with .md files – no need to convert from .md to .org files; I call it Md-roam. This is for my personal use, so it will likely feel rough around the edges, and I cannot provide the excellent level of support that Org-roam project has been doing. But apart from that, you are welcome to try it out. I will try out Obsidian, and see if Md-roam can borrow some ideas from Obsidian – e.g. ![[filelink]] and [[internal link]] sytanx.
Thanks for mentioning Obsidian; never thought of trying it out without this post.
Its capability and underlining logic to detect links for markdown files are a superset of Md-roam – even sub-directories and the the pandoc syntax of [@citation-key] as part of “Unlinked mentions”.
Looks like I can use Emacs for better editing experience (for me, Emacs key-binding of text navigation is natural), and use Obsidian for exploring my knowledge graph…
@nobiot This is exactly what I needed. I’ve had been keeping an eye over your project, but now that I’ve started using obsidian this is exactly what I need to make it compatible with obsidian! Thank you so much!
