The State of Org-Roam for Actual Beginners

Meta
21

I think these are good points @jethro.

I guess, what I personally want from an experienced user, or someone who recently learned Emacs/Org-Roam are shoulders to stand on. There are absolutely some good tutorials out there written by you and others. I popped into this thread to say, hey! I’m up and running with very little experience in Emacs despite the fact that org-roam is a fairly new package, but I really wanted to convey why it was a difficult process and what might be on an Emacs/Org-Roam newbie’s mind in 2020 (i.e. there are great alternatives out there, including the actual Roam app… what can be further done to pull that user in).

I think there are people in this thread with really, really strong opinions (that are sadly displacing those opinions on the beginners in this thread) that you need to go through the same 10 years of learning and struggle they did in order to have “true understanding” of the medium… never mind the fact that 10 years of material has been added to the encyclopedia-style guidebook over this period. This argument- that damn kids these days don’t know how to do x’ can frankly be applied to any job or knowledge body, and has been argued since the time of Plato, and I frankly don’t really buy it.

You haven’t insulted me at all- you’ve just taken my quotes and applied your very odd and misplaced get-off-my-lawn-anger towards a generation and shoved it in a place it doesn’t belong. This isn’t a TikTok comment section or a subreddit where we discuss SHTF scenarios. We’re in a very small forum discussing a very niche topic. We all already know the world is fragile and knowledge is increasingly fragmented. It’s not news to anyone here. You clearly spent way too much time in your CS classes and not nearly enough time in the real world gaining common sense, empathy, and human interaction skills.

That said, there are tons of hello world tutorials out there, but good intermediate project examples are invaluable. It’s just great to see differences between the hello example and how an ‘average user’ uses a library… Who cares if it’s not exactly how I would use it. Sometimes these differences can be fairly drastic and enlightening @jethro .

In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with copying and pasting per se… it’s just another way of learning.
Monkey see, monkey do. Many people don’t get past the hello world examples, or the beginning of documentation, and many people don’t go beyond the copying and pasting, but in an environment like Emacs and with a library that leverages libraries like org-roam- very, very foreign stuff to an outsider. It’s totally possible to get up and running in a simple way with the right tutorials and start hacking (learning Lisp, creating custom config, creating a Vanilla Emacs setup from scratch, going back and reading the full Emacs documentation) from there.

2 Likes
22

@zzz Very good points in general, you’ve returned me my faith in humanity.

Since you are a junior dev, I don’t have to explain you all the caveats of free and open source DIY software. You’ve had your experience with Linux and retreated back to Windows, for a reason. I think if you re-read your first post here you’ll see what’s wrong with it.

What I still cannot understand is people complaining about the lack of resources on Emacs. There are tons of different kinds of manuals, forum posts, blogs, compilations of links to personal Emacs configs—just at your fingertips. Sacha Chua is perhaps the most prominent person in Emacs blogosphere. She’s been blogging about Emacs for I think 15 years literally everyday. StackOverflow has every question about Emacs and Org-mode already answered. Then, there are of course GNU official manuals. Skimming through them is a very good starting point. [A joke about university education and googling]. Last but not least, C-h in Emacs is in 80% of all situations your best friend. You are an able person, you do not need beginner tutorials.

You can always ask questions about org-roam in org-roam’s Slack channel, people there including me are always willing to help (just be as you said empathetic).

2 Likes
23

Hi, OP here for a follow-up comment. @zzz wrote “Total newb Emacs/Roam and Windows user here… I recently switched my daily driver non-work Thinkpad from Linux back to Windows…I know just enough Vim to get by.” It’s important not to lose a distinction here between people who are beginners to Emacs like @zzz and what I’m calling “actual beginners” like me, who don’t know Linux or Vim before coming to Emacs and org-roam. The distinction is important primarily because of comments about the resources available to newcomers. @mshevchuk agreed with my first post about the lack of resources but disagreed with @zzz’s claim that there were few resources for learning Emacs. I imagine that this is because Emacs has very few resources for “actual beginners” but many more for programmers who are simply Emacs beginners.

BTW, Stallman’s anecdote about the secretaries learning programming because the only obstacle was their belief that they couldn’t program…I’m 99% confident that this never happened. :slightly_smiling_face: If anyone has a source from one of those secretaries who learned programming from the Emacs manual, rather than from someone promoting Emacs, I’d love to see it!

4 Likes
24

@cobblepot Yes, the situation is very different for people with no prior programming experience and for those that have been exposed to programming. If a person has worked in the field for several years—doesn’t matter whether they did html/javascript or system administration—they would (should?) be able to use the existing resources on Emacs in a relatively straightforward manner. If a person instead comes, roughly said, from Miscrosoft Word, then some understanding of the basic programming concepts is inevitably required and the learning curve will be steeper.

I don’t know whether Stallman’s anecdote really happened or not, but a secretary using a computer 45 years ago would appear to a modern person as if they were programming. Using a computer and programming were not that different back then. But maybe I’m wrong, I was born later.

25

I understand your pain @cobblepot, We have interacted on various forums about this. I was one of the people that was interested in helping out writing a “Getting Started Guide” and I was one of the people that bailed. TBF, Dissertation comes first for me, so I am pretty busy getting that finished.

Some background: I did not use linux, emacs, vim, whatever till a few months ago, when I discovered emacs and org-roam. I did not even know the note taking system was called ZettleKasten, I just saw that hey, I can create a knowledge graph - this is what I need. I eventually read “How to take smart notes” downloaded emacs and doom and started.

Yes, windows is a pain to get emacs + doom to get running on. I made the switch to linux because it would be easier. I am also an academic working with tech dinosaurs, who want MS office documents. There is an easy way around this - its called LibreOffice, which pretty much allows you to work with .docx .pptx etc. There is also office 365, which works in the browser and allows you pretty much all the functionality you want. Then there is ox-pandoc package in emacs that will allow you to output docx. There are ways to get around the hurdle.

If you do not want to switch to linux for all your work, there is also the option of spending less than $100 for a top of the line raspberry pi, installing linux and emacs on it, and accessing it over ssh -X. Add gdrive/dropbox and you can remotely add papers, take notes on them and create your knowledge graph. This is option I am considering setting up for myself. I can let you know how it goes.

Yes, there is an ethos here about being self directed and figuring out the solution to your problem. You share the solution with others in hopes it might be helpful. I have spent many hours trying to customize my emacs getting it to work just the way I want. When I discover a new use, I work on getting it working for me. I ask people for help, if they can’t give it - or don’t have the time, no problem, open an issue on github asking for help. Post on forums. If no one can help, you are at in impasse - develop a solution yourself, or realize what you want cannot be done (at that moment).

Yes, emacs+doom+org-roam is not there where it needs to be for a plug and play experience. But at the same time, some of us do not want that plug and play experience. My capture templates may look a lot different than someone else’s because of the information I want to capture. Emacs is about that freedom.

I genuinely feel that the majority of the problems you are facing are because of your perceptions of being “locked in” to windows. There is a reason that programmers on windows tend to use VCcode, sublime, atom etc over emacs. It just doesn’t work well in windows. You’re better off using an IDE or something if you are programming in windows.

1 Like
26

Setting up a VM (e.g. VirtualBox) will be easier, cheaper and more practical. In the end the lack of integration with your working environment will end up annoying you either way.

27

I realize this is an old topic but recent improvements in Zotero prompted me to suggest it to @cobblepot as the app that will do all the things he wants.
I wrote part of my thesis using Spacemacs and Zotero and even wrote a guide describing my workflow.
Zotero’s current beta version is very stable now and has very good reference management, citation, pdf annotation, note-taking, and drafting capabilities. The one thing it falls down on is outlining - which of course is a major strength of org-mode. A workaround for outlining is suggested here reports [Zotero Documentation]
Check out Zotero at https://www.zotero.org/

28

Hi, thanks for this. Can you link to your guide describing your workflow?

Zotero’s outlining capabilities are, I think, insufficient for someone like me that frequently reorganizes large parts of their outline as part of their writing process. I have returned to Freeplane, an open-source mindmapping program (www.freeplane.org), as a way to write and organize my writing. I’m still trying to figure out some parts, but I think that soon I will have internalized Pandoc markdown, and I am anticipating writing in Freeplane with citekeys (using BetterBibTex in Zotero), exporting to markdown, then using Zettlr or Pandoc directly to get a formatted document.

29

@cobblepot
Here is the link to my guide: An Absolute Beginners Guide to Spacemacs for Academic Writing – Ontological Blog
I’m afraid it might be somewhat out of date since I haven’t revised it recently.

Also, this is not my current workflow. I am currently using LibreOffice Writer for writing. It’s outlining capability in Navigator has improved quite a bit recently.

One app with strong outlining features that I am familiar with is Cherrytree (a very capable PIM). I will follow up with a few more.

Best regards and happy writing,
Chris.

30

Another good super PIM is Treeline.
And there is the very different Treesheets.

31

You might also like Manuskript (similar to the sophisticated, non-FOSS, Scrivener - suitable for draft writing).

32

A very interesting discussion here. Thanks for all of your viewpoints an thoughts.

I want to point out a “beginner’s” like tutorial about emacs, orgmode, orgroam and other nice stuff. David Wilson aka SystemCrafters offers some great tutorial videos on YouTube. It helped and does help me a lot!

2 Likes
33

Also worth noting that much of the earlier discussion was centered around Org-roam v1, which I personally find a bit more involved than the current version.

34

Hey man. I’m wondering what your solution is now.

What do you do now? Do you use PKM apps instead?

35

I am currently using a combo of PKM apps and mindmap apps. I still don’t feel I have a good, stable solution, unfortunately.