Making Journal Entries Findable

Hi folks,

I’ve been using org-mode for a long time, and have more recently been adopting org-roam (thanks!)

Before org-roam, I’d have a “notes.org” file that would have date-based notes I could put in there. For instance, if a bank or a school called me, I’d quickly hit org capture for a note. It would let me enter a headline and some notes.

Later, it would be very easy to hit C-c a s and hit a keyword and poof, there are my notes from every time I talked to the bank about something.

I’d rather do all this within org-roam, to facilitate linking in both directions with org-roam topics.

I have org-journal configured for org-roam in the usual way. org-journal creates a new org-roam topic for each day.

The problem is: I may have three unrelated things on that day. Setting the tags for the overall file doesn’t make much sense, since there’s unrelated stuff in there. org-roam doesn’t seem to search on headlines or :tags: within the file. I can’t just find all my bank-related notes easily.

Any ideas?

I’ve also been struggling with a similar transition in adapting my journaling to accommodate keeping notes with org-roam.

Before I started using org-roam, I had been using a single journal file with an org-capture template set to use a file+olp+datetree target to keep my journal in a journal-2020.org file. Then I’d use C-s, C-r, or C-c \ to search the entire journal file.

But then I switched to using org-journal with a one-file-per-day journal system (e.g., today’s file is called 2020-09-15.org), which is nice because I can link to notes created with org-roam and the backlinks lead right to the journal for that day.

Searching across only my journal entries is what has been tricky, however two things have helped: Deft and org-journal-search; org-journal-search is part of org-journal and it’s an awesome feature that I only discovered in the process of writing this comment! :tada:

Maybe this helps?

Hi! Thanks for these ideas.

One of the things I want is the ability to search on any
combination of tags. org-journal-search doesn’t quite do that.
Deft can, reasonably enough, and might just be a fine answer for
me here. Deft is a bit on the slow side and I worry about how
thousands of more journal entries will do, but perhaps I should
save that problem for another day!

Doom Emacs also has the SPC n s menu to search through the notes.
Like Deft but faster somehow. I found that I could mix tags in
there with :tag1 :tag2 as the search string and it did the right
thing.

Thanks for the nudge in the right direction!