Before responding to your question, I need to correct myself: “full-search” was meant to be “full-text search”. Apologies if this caused any confusion.
@schemar Thank you for your elaborate clarification.
I agree and this may be (only) one mental model that most Emacs users, with their diverse backgrounds and usages, might share. If you do not mind reading a long-form article, this blog and video presentation eloquently discusses this point. I’ll quote one paragraph that echoes with @schemar’s “one tool process” statement, which I agree with.
Your focus should be on the workflow. On the whole system that helps you get things done with Emacs. Because that is what your actual experience is about. You benefit from the set of /emergent qualities/ that become available in the combination of otherwise disparate pieces of functionality.
On the question of a mental model of “normal Org-roam folk”, I have been drafting a response, which has become too long. I’ll try to write a short version below and might make a separate post with the full version, if I get round to finishing it.
It’s perhaps not precise to think of “Org-roam folk” having a single mental model and I think that each one of us has a different, somewhat overlapping, mental model about their notes in Org-roam. I find it useful to think of three typical modes of usage of Org-roam as follows. They are based on my observation on this forum.
- Task management
- Information / knowledge repository
- Thinking tool
From what I have observed, everyone uses Org-roam with one or more modes of usage. In relation to your question on search capability, depending on the combination, our requirement for “search” capability differs.
As for myself, I have been using only the “information / knowledge repository” mode for work and striving to use the “thinking tool” mode for private (like this post). I don’t use the “task management” mode at all.
Task management mode.
I think one of the most elaborate workflows is that of @d12frosted. He has a great walk-through of his task management usage with Org-roam in his blog series with explanatory GIF animation and images. Most users of this mode seems to use Org-agenda as the way to retrieve and display TODOs from various notes in a dashboard-like presentation (refer to images from the blog post linked above).
Information / knowledge repository mode.
I think the key for this mode is quick search and retrieval of relevant notes through a large collection of them. Examples of this mode includes this post, which talks about a 15 million text files and 15 thousand OCRed books. It’s by far the largest information / knowledge repository I have heard on this forum. Mine for work is around 365 in the last 1.5 years of daily use (less than one note per day). If I remember correctly, I have seen 10,000+ notes mentioned a couple of times in Slack and this forum, and it appears 1,000-3,000 notes in less than 12 months are rather common.
For my usage of this mode, I personally use mainly the following:
-
org-roam-node-findwith titles, tags, and the number of backlinks displayed in the list of candidates. I also usesavehist-modeso that recently worked notes appear on top of the candidate list (there are several ways to achieve this, depending on your “completion framework”, such asivy-mode,helm-mode; I usevertico-mode).My candidate list looks like this (the configuration is described in our community wiki).
I only use four tags:
#creation,#reference,#index,#meeting. Only the#creationtag is for “thinking tool mode” and the other three are different categories of information / knowledge. Tags can be made appear in the list of notes withorg-roam-node-find, so it’s easy to just to look for meeting and index files. The index note is one way to achieve the “map of concepts” as @schemar describes above. I have one index note per topic and have 16 index notes for my 365 work notes at the moment. The screen shot is for my private Org-roam. This one does not really contain useful information or knowledge; they are meant to be more for the “thinking tool” usage. I have 5 index notes for 217 notes. -
ripgrepandconsult-ripgrepfor full-text search and retrieval. It’s really a great toolset to find a “needle in the hay” – a specific word, name or phrase that would be unlikely to be part of the title. -
I use the “time stamp” as the key to look for something. All my note files are named with a creation time stamp in the format of
yyyy-mm-ddThhmmss.ext. If I want to find a record of a meeting, I can easily find notes and other related files around the same date or month. This goes beyond Org-roam and Emacs. Most my work files have date prefix (yyyymmdd_). It is much more useful than it might sound. Much of my work related information is based on specific events – trade shows, customer meetings, launch of a new product, etc. – so it is a great way to look for all the files in the context of a specific event.
Thinking tool mode.
I think “thoughts” should be differentiated from information / knowledge. The key differentiator is my own perspective and judgement beyond the record of facts; a good thought captures my own perspective built on a collection of information about relevant facts. My hope for me as a user of Org-roam is to be able to use it better as a tool that helps me think better. One good example is probably the usage of Jethro himself (the author of Org-roam).
As for my usage for the “thinking tool” mode, most of the elements I describe for the “information / knowledge repository” mode also apply, but I find myself using search by ripgrep less. The title and links usually take me back to the chain of thought I had when I was writing the idea and thought in the note.
In addition, I am considering of using more of org-roam-ui – like this:
I would like to use it not to connect thoughts, but to prune (remove) stray notes, so that I can focus on the good ideas that I can develop over time. I find 217 thoughts / idea notes are bit too many at this stage – some of them are those I made for even debugging and forgot to delete… As you can see in the graph, I have a lot of stray notes around the connected notes.
So this is it. This has become very long (even for a short version). Thank you for indulging me… I hope some bits can be helpful to others.