Love org-roam. I've been heavily using it for a few months, and not looking back.

Don't miss these additional packages, which build on org-roam:

org-roam-server: better graph visualization and navigation [1]

org-roam-bibtex: Reference management in your Zettelkasten [2]

The latter, combined with org-ref and org-noter, is the most effective way I've found for taking notes on PDFs. Beautiful demo at [3].

FWIW RoamResearch has yet to implement a useful graph view, PDF annotation, or reference management. OTOH, tending to a setup like this in Emacs can easily become a time-sink, and it's single-player only.

[1]: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-server

[2]: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-bibtex

[3]: https://youtu.be/Wy9WvF5gWYg

> tending to a setup like this in Emacs can easily become a time-sink

I've started to wonder if the Emacs community should put together versions that are ready for different kinds of users out of the box. Say, a version for scholars with everything Auctex, org/org-roam, spell check, email, rss, etc already there, and a walkthrough to boot. Like a distro or spin, basically.

There are a few projects that do this, but I think there's certainly room for more. I'd love to see one focused on using the Zettelkasten method.

Here are three I'm aware of:

Scimax: https://github.com/jkitchin/scimax

Emacs Speaks Statistics: https://github.com/emacs-ess/ESS

Frontmacs: https://github.com/thefrontside/frontmacs

So long as these approaches expose the full power of Emacs to their users, I can't imagine the UX being as rock-solid as we might expect from modern purpose-built tools (e.g. PyCharm, Overleaf, Obsidian, ...).

It might help to hide/disable most default interactive functions, which provide a huge surface area for non-Emacsers to break things. Emacs actually does this by default for a few functions: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DisabledCommands

Also relevant here is wakib-keys: https://github.com/darkstego/wakib-keys.

Thank you! Good pointers indeed.

The rising popularity of Emacs “starter kits” (Doom, Spacemacs, Centaur, Prelude, etc) is exactly in this spirit. While not segmented by audience, each of them aims to provide sane defaults and package collections for a varied set of common use cases.

Yeah, I hear that. I still think segmenting by audiences - especially non-programmer audiences - would make it possible to really pitch it as an alternative to tools like, for academics and writers, Scrivener and Word. An audience-segmented starter kit based on other starter kits, perhaps.