The Org-roam v2 Great Migration

Development
7

I’ve been eyeing on v2 for a while and tried it out today. I reverted to v1 shortly after.
Here’s my thoughts and experience. I think most of them are non-issues, and will soon be fixed going forward, but I’m echoing my voice anyway.

Before I start, I want to mention that I use Doom Emacs. I have all my notes already version controlled, so I can easily revert changes to my notes, but it is not the same for many others.
As such, introducing automated changes to notes should be made with caution.

Installing

For some reason, I could not fetch v2 by adding :branch v2 into my package! recipe, even when I copied the recipe from the wiki guide. I ended up going to my local straight.el clone and switch the branch to the alpha release.

I’m guessing this is not Org-roam problems. Moving on.

Migrating notes

  • Firstly I found the downloaded migrate script have some syntax error, as I pointed out in a reply above. A trivial fix is enough to make the script functional

Step 1:

  • As the script runs, it opened the buffer for every single notes. So I have to wait for inline Latex previews to render.
  • The script made error and halt for my old notes, because the #+latex_header: \addbibresource{...} parts in those notes was wrong and I had to fix this. I don’t know why the script cares about bib sources. Maybe it tried to re-render math previews in those files, but the LaTeX previews did not re-render when I manually visited those files – the preview images were already cached.

Step 2:

  • Lots of duplicate ID errors popped up and I don’t know why, but they did not halt the script, so I let it happened
  • After this step, I tried restarting Emacs, but it asked me to confirm changes to all 664 of my notes. A quick check via magit shown that all notes have been created with IDs, so I kill emacs without saving all visited files.
  • I restarted Emacs. The duplicate errors popped up again. And I ran step 3.

I also change all #+roam_tags to #+filetags, using rg and ivy-occur, and I restarted again.

Using v2

  • org-roam-find-node successfully found my nodes. However, none of them showed any backlinks. A project-wise rg search returned almost zero file: links in my notes folder; that should mean that links are successfully converted. So why no backlinks are displayed?
  • Calling the template for org-dailies returned an error. I guess the dailies functionality has not been made into v2 yet?

After playing around with v2 a little, I decided to revert back to v1. Backlinks and capturing didn’t work for me, so I think I should wait a little more until v2 rounds its edges.