Hi everyone, I’m reading up on the features of org-roam but I’m having trouble finding an alternative to what I’m coming from. I’ve been using the Zkn3 tool which comes with two features I find particularly useful for writing papers. The first is it allows me to generate what it terms note sequences, chains of notes where I am following up on a given line of thought, or branching off into a new line of thought and continue in that direction (they can also be thought of as child notes). The second is it then allows me to grab groups of notes, whether individual ones or the note sequences, and stick them in an outliner to work with.
In org-roam I certainly have an easy time of generating notes, and setting up one-off links between notes, but I’m stuck when it comes to doing useful and expedient things with the notes beyond just rudimentary copy-paste of the notes into another file. The org-roam author wrote this post relating back to the How to Take Smart Notes book and showed how to do the notes side of things: https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/how_to_take_smart_notes_org/ and at the very end, for the part I’m interested in, he links a Youtube video which basically depends on one-by-one note discovery rather than using a deliberate chain of premeditated notes (for the record, I am interested in replicating what’s in the video in org-roam if anyone has any pointers, I do see that as a useful ability)
Searching through the Discourse I have found this thread which seems to allow developing link types like the child notes with which I’m familiar from my current tool mentioned above: https://org-roam.discourse.group/t/add-link-tags-feature/171 I will have to do more research on these link types possible in v2 and see how well they appear in the side buffer. But there is then the other problem of then doing useful and expedient things with these notes even if I can easily generate sequences of child notes. How would I think grab a set of notes and stick them into another file to use in an outline? As it stands it seems that I either have to copy a note after manually popping it open and pasting it into another document, or use something more like org-transclusion which I have seen pop up in discussions in Slack but that still mandates I manually create the reference blocks for every note I want to use.
I appreciate any pointers to developing a workflow which more readily makes use of my natural train of thought and leads into outlining a manuscript with minimal friction to start the writing process.
I know I’m a bit late but I just found this post and it just so happens that I have recently been working on a package for doing this exact thing. Take a set of notes, organize them and create an outline from their info. You can see it here GitHub - Vidianos-Giannitsis/zetteldesk.el: Zetteldesk.el is an emacs library built on top of org-roam with the purpose of easier revision on various subjects and a better outliner tool for emacs.
Would love to here your opinion on it and if it serves the purpose you need. It does sound like its what you are looking for as my motivation for making this is similar to your needs.
@AuroraDraco Thanks for making this and posting it for others like myself to benefit from (I was chatting with you on the issue with gifs, finally got back around to replying here). Your package definitely nips one of my two hangups (boiling down to [1] collecting notes for doing work and [2] generating sets of notes as lines of thought). Not long after I had posted this thread I had stumbled across delve, which I did see you mentioned in your readme, so it appears there are some in the community actively working on this. I had chatted with a few people in the Slack group who pointed me to some other possibilities. I like your package as a straightforward way of getting notes gathered and into an outline, and I will actively monitor it for the future.
As a followup to my original post I had found others discussing my other hangup ([2] above) which was generating sets of notes as lines of thought. I found this post where someone asked the same question and was directed to a video for logseq where the simple use of threaded notes was a means of achieving this:
https://org-roam.discourse.group/t/how-to-emulate-luhmanns-system/2331
This appears to echo the org-roam author’s own suggestions in an open github issue:
https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam/issues/1451
However, this approach does not seem to be viable because while it does allow for easy branching of these notes upon creation, it does not allow for easy extrication of a particular line of thought from the branches to do things with, for example insertion in the zetteldesk.el package above. With scattered notes in the database, hunting them down and adding them to the desktop is work I would expect to encounter, but if I have a particular line of thought in mind within that branching structure then I have to do just as much hunting and adding despite its already organized structure.
This friction may be somewhat ameliorated by some enhancements I’m anticipating from delve’s author with the org-roam-ui project where I can imagine grabbing a thread of nodes from the graph that could then be stuck into the delve machinery. Perhaps in the future zetteldesk.el could include similar integration. I also have some half-baked thoughts in mind as a feature/extension for org-roam to keep track of note sequences the same way Zkn3 does it as an element of the org-roam side buffer, but that’s a project for another day when I’ve built up some familiarity with the code base.