Zettelkasten on Org-Roam is a two tool process? Am I doing this right?

From these, I’m assuming you are looking for full-text search, not just searching the title of notes.

Org-roam does not have full-search capability and it’s a good thing :slight_smile:

There are tools dedicated to full-search and they work well with Org-roam in your Emacs environment. You might say these are “another tool”; yes, but it’s just an additional “plug-in” to Emacs and Org-roam to enhance your workflow. To me, this composability of dedicated tools in a single application (Emacs) is one of its attraction.

One popular full-text search toolkit is a combination like these:

  • grep and consult-grep
  • ripgrep and consult-ripgrep

grep and ripgrep are both command line programs that work in your terminal. consult-grep and consult-ripgrep are functions that are included in a popular Emacs package called consult.

Both work well on my Ubuntu machine and I use ripgrep on my Windows. You can look for files within your Org-roam directory (or wherever in your file system) that contain text string “icloudpd” for example.

Depending on your OS, grep might already come with it. It’s a classic full-text search program that has stood the test of time and still is widely used by many software engineers and system administrators who live in command line terminals.

ripgrep is a new incarnation of grep and is purported to be faster and seems to be gaining popularity. You would usually need to install it separately as instructed in its GitHub page – in most OS’s it’s very easy to do with a package manager.

For additional information on consult-ripgrep with Org-roam, see the post below for a good detail and video demonstration.

The post talks about a custom function to fine-tune consult-ripgrep but you can use it (and consult-grep) with no custom functions.

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