Org-roam and org-journal integration - auto recording of inserted link to new entry

How To
1

Heya org-roamers,

I’m currently leaning into v2 after being off emacs for a while and deciding I needed it back.

I use both the org-roam-dailies (for my daily log file) but also org-journal for my private morning pages every day (cause perfer it private and ecnrpyted.). At the moment, I’ve got this triggering via the org-journal new entry function, buutttttttt… what i want is:

  1. triggers an insert link in roam and then that…
  2. Fires off the org-journal-new-entry
  3. so that I get a link to the new journal entry in org-roam under my “Morning Pages” daily template where I fired it off from

I have not been able to puzzle out how to do this (mostly due to poor lisp-fu) but imagine this is a trivial for the better emacs-er/lisp-ers.

Can anyone give me an idea of how that needs to be done to make the two programs work more seamlessly.
(so, I accmplish the same right now… manually… by copying the link to the headline in the org-journal file and then pasting that back in under the Morning Pages, but this should of course be automated.

Would love some help with this.
thanks!
Daryl.

2

If this is the reason, why not use only org-roam-dailies? Or org-journal only. Why combine?

3

I think I explained poorly. I use them for two separate concerns.

I use the roam functions to have a /dailies directory where I have a standard log template for each day. combining work and personal stuff, meeting notes, some meta data about the day etc.

Within that template I have a section that I would prefer to have a link to the encrypted yearly org-journal file which is basically my daily journal. What I am trying to do is somehow have an auto link inserted (as if it was org-roam-insert but have it fire off org journal new entry and create a heading (and standard format) for my private journal/morning pages etc.

Does that make a bit more sense? Apologies if I was unclear.

4

Thanks. I see.

You may not get a ready-to-paste code sample in this forum – your case is an intersection of org-roam-dailies and org-journal, and the person needs to be able to code and to engage in this forum… I don’t know how many are in this small intersection.

I use neither, so I can think of only something generic.

Idea 1

I would assume that your journal file name and heading title can be derived easily from today’s date – e.g. file name: “2022-journal.org”, heading title “2021-02-28”.
If this is the case, I believe you can use your dailies template and directly insert a link as part of the template:

;; Chaniging lines for readability
"#+title: %<%Y-%m-%d>/n
* journal /n
[[%<%Y-journal.org>*%<%Y%m%d>][Link to journal entry]]
"

Then you could create a custom interactive function that simply calls (org-journal-new-entry nil) and (org-roam-dailies-capture-capture) (or the command that you use) in sequence. They don’t need to be “integrated” by passing values from one to the other in the program.

Idea 2

If you cannot easily derive the file name and heading title from the date, you might like looking into org-journal-after-entry-create-hook. As org-journal-new-entry should move your cursor (point) to the journal buffer and the heading created, you should be able to get the file name (buffer-file-name) and the heading (e.g. org-heading-components) or point (point), and then construct a link.

5

Embarrassingly, I should have thought of Idea 1 as a simple hack around to what I wanted to get (as I have new journal entries hotkeyed), so I have templated my normal daily log format (as you cleverly pointed out) and then just trigger the daily entry with the keypress I was using before and it’s auto hooked up. Nice one.

I’ll work a little longer on the idea of having it create the link, trigger the new journal entry when I get a chance to do some lisp-fu.

Thanks for the very thougthtful answers. Appreciate it!

ciao and thanks for the help!
Daryl.