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Org-roam was built to support a workflow that was not possible with vanilla Org-mode. This flow is modelled after the Zettelkasten method, and many of Roam Research's workflows. It is crucial to understand that Org-roam does not auto-magically make note-taking better -- it's changing the note-taking workflow that does.
To understand more about the methods and madness, the Note-Taking Workflow page contains a page of useful references. The author has also written a post about how he uses Org-roam.
Activating Org-roam
Org-roam's entry point is the global minor org-roam-mode. This sets
up Emacs with several hooks, for keeping the org-roam cache
consistently updated, as well as showing the backlinks buffer.
The cache is a sqlite database named org-roam.db, which resides at
the root of the org-roam-directory. Activating org-roam-mode
builds the cache, which may take a while the first time, but is
generally instantaneous in subsequent runs. To build the cache
manually again, run M-x org-roam-db-build-cache.
Finding a Note
org-roam-find-file shows the list of titles for notes that reside in
org-roam-directory. Selecting a note title will bring you to the
corresponding note. Entering a title of a note that does not yet exist
will create a new note with that title.
Note that in the above image, the ivy
completion frontend is used. The default frontend has some usability issues with
non-matching candidates (e.g. when you want to enter a title of a new note,
there is no completion candidate), so either ivy or helm is recommended.
Inserting Links
org-roam-insert insert links to existing (or new) notes. Entering a
non-existent title will also create a new note with that title.
Good usage of Org-roam requires liberally linking files. This allows the build-up of a dense knowledge graph.
The Org-roam Buffer
The Org-roam buffer is often displayed in the side window. It shows backlinks for the currently active Org-roam note, along with some surrounding context.
Exporting the Graph
Org-roam also uses Graphviz to generate a graph, with notes as nodes, and links between them as edges. The generated graph can be used to navigate to the files, but this requires some additional setup described in the Roam Protocol page.
