Last weekend I installed Org-roam on my productive Desktop system. I applied the knowledge that I gained on playing around with it on the virtual machine and now I’m having an installation running to take my notes.

Problems

My approach is to put the notes into my dropbox folder, so that this can be synchronized between machines. I also setup a hidden config directory in this folder holding the configuration and I tried to put the org-roam.db file there as well. But this didn’t work, probably because its a SQLite database that needs to be accessed exclusively only by the running org-roam instance.

I changed the completion system from „ido to „Helm“ because ido makes it really difficult to enter spaces in the title of a document. It is possible with „C-q SPC“, but that is nevertheless a big obstacle. So I switched to helm which looks really good at the moment.

Achievements

Well, system is up and running. I can capture notes, and play around with the system. I also implemented a tipp from the discourse forum that makes entering links to other docuoments quite fast and easy.

I also created my org-protocol so that I can easily browse my network of notes in web browser with the help of org-roam-server. And I can capture notes for web pages easily by just using a bookmarklet.

The org-roam-server view looks like this (This is what I have created at the moment, but its growing):

I created some „Index“ nodes for Org-roam related stuff, ideas and questions that came to my mind and that I need to answer. The nice thing is that this is really the place to store ideas that are not yet actionable, so orgmode where the „action“ part of my GTD system happens would be the wrong place. But in org-roam I can create something like „Let me think about an Idea X“ and if after a while I come to the conclusion that no some action needs to be done I can define a task in orgmode and link from my org-roam note to this task. Somehow this feels like an extension to my brain which makes it easier to think on new ideas. Or just collect whatever comes to my mind without the need to have an immediate action on this.