Org-roam major redesign

This has become long after writing it – it’s an interesting topic (“transition” from OneNote). We might like to post separately, as it is going off topic from V2 :wink:

I still use OneNote in parallel. It has been (still is) integral to my work; the integration from Outlook for meeting notes, iPad app for handwritten notes, search including the handwritten notes, etc. etc.; these are just so good if your daily work life is embedded in MS Office Suite.

I decided to try out Emacs and Org-roam for work throughout this year. This was triggered by the fact now that I have too many OneNote items (I think it’s more than 5,000) that the API started to not work when you create meeting notes from within Outlook (one of the major benefits gone like this).

I am still experimenting and started to identify some “key gaps” (not very firm “requirements”, really — just some points of frictions). Some are not functional; it’s relation between my adaptation and tool’s concept.

  1. Search text
    Solved with Ripgrep (within Emacs)

  2. Image pasting (for screen shots)
    Solved with my custom function for Windows

  3. Notes on “recurring” events, such as meetings on a specific theme / topic / issue
    Creating a shell of a meeting notes from Outlook calendar entry (with participants, date, etc.) is not achievable – not worth trying in my view. I think this is where using the classic bullet points style of Org Mode might be more useful than the “atomic” nature of Zettelkasten notes; that is, I can create a note on a theme or meeting, and use each heading as an event with a time stamp (e.g. Meeting on 2021-03-20), etc. etc.

  4. Handwritten notes, and search
    I am thinking of something like this. Not sure if this is going to work, but it should be fun to try:
    Org/ vs. org/org-roam/ directories OR am I supposed to link to files outside of org-roam? - #7 by nobiot

2 Likes