Loving all the Emacs stuff on HN lately. The cool thing about integrating with Emacs and Org Mode is that you automatically have access to the whole ecosystem. In my experience trying out alternatives, that’s the major shortcoming of other systems—it’s so hard to get your information into them from other sources. Everyone raves about OneNote, but the modern versions don’t even integrate emails and notes.
Meanwhile in Emacs, you can use a client like Notmuch for email (https://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-emacs) and drop links to individual emails or email queries into your notes (https://git.sr.ht/~tarsius/ol-notmuch). I use this to minimize context switching while keeping reference material nearby. It also enables workflows that integrate emails, todos, etc. with checklists in notes. For example I have a “weekly review” Org document that has links to email and todo queries for staying on top of flagged emails, or low priority tasks that nonetheless need to be moved along.
I love reading stuff like this. I’m getting into the whole emacs thing via doom specifically because I despise how graphical and sandboxed every productivity app is.
One thing made by Prot that has made a big difference to me is his high-contrast light theme Modus Operandi, which has made working on my laptop on Emacs outside in bright sunlight a cinch. It's comprehensive in terms of the modes it supports, and he chose colours based on WCAG AAA standards. Like Denote, it's excellently documented. Highly recommended.
The documentation of the package, i.e. the very link of this thread is worth a read by itself. I 'm not an Emacs user so I won't use this but I enjoyed your documentation.
Anything written by Prot is a delight, he takes a lot of care in the design and documentation of what he writes and it's often accompanied by a full write-up and video demo. All his other packages are worth a look as well.
Thank you for this link, just reading the source of that document tells me I have a long way to go before I'm a good technical writer. It's just so wonderfully structured and makes great use of org export.
As I understand it, org-roam uses the database as an information cache to improve performance. But the org roam files are self-contained and doesn't need the database to be saved along with it.
I recall seeing some discussion on emacs-devel about SQLite being bundled with Emacs too. If that came to pass then it's no longer a true external dependency either.
I've been using emacs for over a decade and when it comes to notes in emacs I'm usually on org-mode. This package is interesting, and I like the naming concept. But, I'm not convinced plain-text is a good general purpose note-taking medium.
To be clear, I don't think the issue is that the content is just text. I think text-only systems are great (I built one myself [0]). But, like org-mode, the system should help you make sense of what the text is for or about. I mean what it's about in a mechanical sort of way: such and such format means X and can be recalled like so.
Here's the thing, there's so much you can accomplish with a note-taking practice, whatever medium you choose. I do my books, budget, keep track of my time, manage a running task list, track aspects of my health, all in addition to collecting notes. The _process_ of capturing all this information is exactly the same, I shouldn't need multiple tools for each thing.
But, if I rely on plain-text notes all these functions would add up to a significant time commitment, both on the collection side and the recall side. Not to mention the fact that a lot of time I'm not at my computer to crack open an org-mode buffer.
The thing is, the note-taking system can (and should) supply functionality to support all the things you might want to include in your note-taking practice.
And sure, there could be some specialized functions that are not practical within the note-taking system. But as long as there's an easy way to extract the information to plug into something else -- it's all good.
Meanwhile in Emacs, you can use a client like Notmuch for email (https://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-emacs) and drop links to individual emails or email queries into your notes (https://git.sr.ht/~tarsius/ol-notmuch). I use this to minimize context switching while keeping reference material nearby. It also enables workflows that integrate emails, todos, etc. with checklists in notes. For example I have a “weekly review” Org document that has links to email and todo queries for staying on top of flagged emails, or low priority tasks that nonetheless need to be moved along.