Org-Roam Experience
This is a feature I've seen a lot of screenshots of mainly due to the fact it has the cool graphical interpretation of whatever it is you're writing and how it's connected to everything else you've written.
I'm not much of a note taker. Never have been and probably never will be. But I think this is maybe where the joke comes from where people say "you start off by bending Emacs to your workflow, but soon it becomes how to make a workflow that fits into Emacs", or something to that effect at least.
How to actually use this?
There is something appealing for sure about keeping notes on things whilst researching randomness on the internet and also throughout the randomness of our continually traveling lives. I wish I'd kept a better journal as we sailed previously. Heather did a an amazing job at keeping a written one for a while and also a sketch book one which is perhaps easier and more fun to look back at. While at the time of experiencing these things it always seems like you'll remember them forever that is often not true. Heather's journals provide such proof as it's often surprising to look back at these lovely sketches and be like "uh what where was that".
Setup
This turned out to be pretty easy. I had to have GCC installed as well as squeeeelite but in NixOS I mean you just toss those in your ole applications list and Bob's your uncle. The initial install makes a "datebase" of sorts but really its just the way it comes up with the unique file names. All these files are plain text .org files all in a single directory. The linking is therefore done with the hashes which is maybe more organic feeling as they can be ordered in whatever way however many times they're mentioned.
Ideas/Goals
I'm going to try to keep better notes of adventures or things that happen during the day either related to sailing or other just internet topics I spend time researching. There are a lot of what may be lost skills or topics I spent time reading about that I didn't care to or maybe didn't have a clean way to organize or write down.
Motivation
Something else that comes into this I think is the motivation to actuall keep these things up. I wrote about this a bit in the writinginvim blog where the fun of the mini game, "how can I jump and edit exactly what I want to" makes the usually tedious process of editing documents more bareable. I think this whole roam thing can be useful in the same sense. It is an interesting process and way of organizing things, and it's no doubt entertaining to tweak its functionality. All of which will I think make it something that is easier to come back to than, say writing in a paper journal, which just makes my wrists angry.
Initial Annoyances
So far I'm having trouble understanding how to take these files and make them portable. I get that they're plain text which is nice I'm not afraid of loosing them entirely. It's more like can I use what I type elsewhere?
As an example, I'm currently writing this in my Org Roam directory and linking it to other notes and whatnot. Cool, but how can I best use it as a blog post as well? What I've done this time around is just copy and paste the document into a hugo new posts/roam.org file I've made and that works (huge shout out Hugo having Org just work and my architype template now all of a sudden working) but the links are all pointing to the hash database things.
If I were to do like a writing project I'd have to keep two copies of it. One in my Roam directory and one in its own so the LaTeX output files, bibliography files, images, and so on don't get all messed up with the roam stuff and vise-versa?
There is probably an answer or workflow for this I just don't know about yet. Hence the ongoing learning!
Conclusion
There are a lot of ongoing things here currently. Really what I'm after here is embracing Emacs in general as much as possbile for a bit to get enough experience to form my own opions on it. So far though I'm liking it conceptually as well as in practice.