6 ms·

Org-roam-UI – graphical front end for exploring your org-roam Zettelkasten

134 points by coldblues 5y ago

ryanianian 5y ago
I was a pretty big emacs fan in undergrad about 15 years ago. Since then it seems like editors/ides have advanced and eaten emacs’s lunch, and I can barely understand my own .emacs anymore due to disuse. Org mode is the one thing that keeps me interested in emacs, but every time I try to get into it I get hit by emacs anachronisms. I’ve not used this tool or Roam, but are there modern org-mode front ends? Aquamacs is a macOS-flavored emacs distro, but it still intentionally feels like emacs. I’d really like an “org-mode-only” app that feels modern and lets me forget I’m using emacs under the covers.
- procgen 5y ago
  Logseq might fit the bill: https://logseq.com/ https://logseq.com/ I've been using it for a few weeks now after switching over from Roam and it's been great. Everything is plaintext (I use it in markdown mode, but they support org-mode).
  - celeritascelery 5y ago
    I wrote a blog post about integrating org-roam with logseq [1]. Unfortunately this doesn’t work with the the new V2 org-roam update, so I am sticking with V1 for now. [1] https://coredumped.dev/2021/05/26/taking-org-roam-everywhere-with-logseq/ https://coredumped.dev/2021/05/26/taking-org-roam-everywhere...
- emptysongglass 5y ago
  I started from bare emacs configuration and can safely say I almost never touch a line of lisp now that I've switched to Doom emacs. I just uncomment some packages I want (like magit, org-roam, etc.) and it runs off and configures the packages in a non-conflicting manner ready for production. That's not saying banging on lisp to get your emacs into that perfect state isn't fun, just that now that I'm a capitalist worker I don't really have the time for it any more. Highly recommended.
  - atty 5y ago
    I’d second Doom emacs, I consider it the best way to use Vim :D However, I am using it less and less, and I find myself using VSCode more and more. I now very rarely find myself using Doom emacs or vim. I’d say for small changes I still use them, but any time I think I’m going to be doing a significant amount of work in a directory or file, I always open it in VSCode. Not sure when that change happened, honestly.
- User23 5y ago
  > I was a pretty big emacs fan in undergrad about 15 years ago. Since then it seems like editors/ides have advanced and eaten emacs’s lunch, and I can barely understand my own .emacs anymore due to disuse. If I'm writing Java I'll definitely use a JVM hosted IDE like Eclipse, but other than that I'm just not seeing this. For example, I recently decided to try VSCode for a popular scripting language and if anything configuring it to work properly was actually more difficult than getting lsp-mode and few helper packages working in GNU Emacs. Spacemacs[1] is another popular "modern" Emacs distribution that you may be interested in. [1] https://www.spacemacs.org/ https://www.spacemacs.org/
- kkhcxxdf 5y ago
  > Since then it seems like editors/ides have advanced and eaten emacs’s lunch Citation needed, my Emacs talks to the same LSP daemon that my coworkers' VSCode instances talk to, and Emacs has a lot of text editing features VSCode doesn't Plus VSCode is just uglier, and is Microsoft and is it even GPLv3? Maybe I'm becoming irrelevant and I'm going to find myself without a job soon
  - ssivark 5y ago
    I'm all for Emacs, but calling it prettier than VSCode is a bit of a stretch :D Of course aesthetic taste is quite subjective, but I think a lot of people will agree that most modern software (including VSCode) looks much slicker than Emacs (excluding extensively customized outliers). As for my personal taste, Atom is by far the visually most appealing editor I've seen. I don't know enough graphic design to articulate the difference, but I wonder why the look & feel is not replicated more widely.
    - xlii 5y ago
      > excluding extensively customized outliers I might be wrong here but extensive customization is hallmark of Emacs. I would find it very odd if someone wouldn’t customize its presentation to The Exact Way They Like.
      - neolog 5y ago
        Emacs is a text-based editor so it cannot be customized as much as a browser can.
        useragent86 5y ago
        Emacs is a Lisp machine. Even Firefox during its XUL heyday was not as customizeable as Emacs is. Nowadays, with browsers using WebExtensions, browsers are laughably inflexible by comparison. Here are a few topics for you to consider: * Function advice (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Advising-Functions.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Ad...) * Generalized variables and the cl-letf macro (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/cl/Modify-Macros.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/cl/Modif...) * Hooks * Lisp macros in general * Special variables and dynamic binding (note that Emacs Lisp has supported lexical binding for years; some still don't know this) * Buffer-local variables * Live evaluation of Lisp code, including redefining functions and variables, vs. building and loading an extension in a browser Or maybe you were just joking, in which case, you got me good!
- ssivark 5y ago
  > Since then it seems like editors/ides have advanced and eaten emacs’s lunch Is that true? I know that popular editors have tons of extensions available (with VSCode leading the pack), but is any other editor as programmable and user-tweakable as Emacs? I think Atom was an attempt in that spirit, but its momentum was completely killed by VSCode. As an example, which other app will let you link to emails, or specific locations in code, in your organizational tool? I feel that Emacs puts the user in the driver's seat in a way that almost no other piece of modern software even comes close. The only comparable, in my mind, is the *nix/GNU ecosystem, and that's about as ancient as Emacs. ---- PS: One more option that hasn't been mentioned yet is Neorg (Org+Neovim). Was on HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27802153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27802153
  - ssivark 5y ago
    Actually, I forgot to pay homage to LightTable. It had a fantastic vision, a compelling initial demo, and showed it was possible to radically innovate in the editor landscape. IIUC, it played a role in inspiring Atom. Pity things turned out the way they did. I sometimes feel that if the project had stuck it out for a decade with a slightly less ambitious goal, it could have really moved the computing experience forward — even if only for developers / power users.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Look for Obsidian[0]. It's very similar, but operates on it's own Markdown flavour (with imports for Rome and Zettelkasten), that allows you to create pretty elaborate networks of info. [0] https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  Such a tool would inevitably fall behind in what it supports and would lack as well useful integration. It would lack depth and breadth. If prior to 2020 it would have lacked roam support. If prior to this month it would lack roam v2. Then again its useful that org links can link to everything from a page in a document to an email which isn't possible if disconnected from the rest of the emacs ecosystem. What does it even mean for something to be "modern"?
- gjvc 5y ago
  "Prelude is an Emacs distribution that aims to enhance the default Emacs experience" https://prelude.emacsredux.com/en/latest/ https://prelude.emacsredux.com/en/latest/
wudangmonk 5y ago
Every time emacs comes up there's the obligatory hate rant about how they moved on to better more modern tools with vscode being praised but everytime I've tried it, its slower than emacs and crashes more often or just flat out does not work. It seems its only useful for js. I'm always on the lookout for better tools but I honestly feel there is nothing out there. My requirements are of course an emacs but better, why would anyone switch to worse tools?. It has to be faster, more stable but be customizable, its fine if it lacks features just as long as I'm allowed to add them myself. So far I haven't found anything.
- CJefferson 5y ago
  What are you doing that is making vscode crash? Can you reproduce it? I've never had that happen, and I am sure they would take a bug report.
  - wudangmonk 5y ago
    I usually run under linux, with C or C++ codebases. I try it every 3-6 months based on recommendations I read online, it starts fine but after a while it slows/freezes/crashes. I don't bother to do reports to microsoft anymore, wasted enough time doing that with vs studio.
  - iworshipfaangs2 5y ago
    VS code crashes quite often on linux for me, especially when working with files over ~4k lines.
- xcambar 5y ago
  Did it ever cross your mind that comments such as yours contribute to the rant you're complaining about? It really is a self-feeding flame war, and I agree with you, it's kinda annoying.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
noud 5y ago
I've seen several posts about Zettelkasten lately. What is it with this whole Zettelkast way of taking notes? How did Zettelkast become so popular out of the sudden?
- coldblues 5y ago
  The book "How to Take Smart Notes" and YouTube productivity gurus, most likely. I like the method, it's a natural way to structure your notes and spend more time actually writing them than categorizing.
- na85 5y ago
  It's a fad, just like bullet journaling was a few years ago. I'm certain that (again, like bullet journaling) underneath the hype is a decent productivity system, but you have to wade through hordes of breathless fans eager for you to click that subscribe button, etc.
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    it definitely is a fad but of all the fads the backlink based 'unstructured' way to take notes is honestly a very smart idea. It's the first time I've actually stuck with note-taking because it sort of organizes itself which for me was always the biggest problem with notes.
    - useragent86 5y ago
      To me, having to manually make links between notes doesn't seem unstructured, nor does it seem self-organizing. What if it doesn't occur to me to make a link in A pointing to B? Then if I'm reading B and looking at its backlinks, how will I know it's related to A?
      - Barrin92 5y ago
        I can't speak for every implementation, but in the one I use (logseq) if you say back-link 'Podcasts' in 'Audiodrama' then in 'Audiodrama' 'Podcasts' will show up as a 'linked reference' like so (https://imgur.com/5FADCI5 https://imgur.com/5FADCI5), as well as a bi-directional connection in the graph you can get of all your links. Over time this produces something like this (https://imgur.com/6I9ojRG https://imgur.com/6I9ojRG), which is what I meant by self-organizing. Just with back-links without having to create any hierarchies (what i meant by unstructured) you get a data-structure that is actually still pretty insightful.
dangirsh 5y ago
org-roam + org-babel + emacs-jupyter has been my default literate development environment for ~1 year. This package is a hugely welcome upgrade to org-roam-server, and I'm excited to integrate it with my workflow. Thanks!!
skuthus 5y ago
You could do all this work, or you could just use https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/
- iLemming 5y ago
  But then, how would you insert a link (in a note) to a specific line in some codebase? In a different branch. Or a link to a specific email thread in a mailing list? How would you attach images to your notes and manage them in a git repo? How would you encrypt your notes? How do you insert current or tomorrow's date in a note? How do you find all the notes tagged with a date? ¹ Most importantly, what would you do when you accumulate several thousand notes, and suddenly Obsidian authors ask you to pay for it? Having my note taking system in Emacs has incredible benefits - I have google-translate, thesaurus, dictionary, spell-checker, Grammarly checker, etc., All right here, everything is accessible without focus and context switching. And, of course, I can change virtually any behavior of any part of the system. And I never have to worry that someday, someone would ask me to pay for "premium features". ----- ¹ I don't know, perhaps Obsidian has some of those features, and maybe they are even better and more intuitive than in Emacs, but I doubt it would ever be as versatile.
  - lovecg 5y ago
    I’d love to learn more about your setup, especially how you attach images. Still tuning my own org mode config!
    - ungamedplayer 5y ago
      Not op. Use the misnamed org-download.
    - iLemming 5y ago
      Some functionality I mentioned is built-in, some is done via packages: - google-translate - mw-thesaurus - gucong/emacs-sdcv - emacs-grammarly/lsp-grammarly To make Org mode take care of versioning of attachments for you: https://orgmode.org/manual/Automatic-version_002dcontrol-with-Git.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Automatic-version_002dcontrol-wit...

134 points by coldblues 5y ago

I was a pretty big emacs fan in undergrad about 15 years ago. Since then it seems like editors/ides have advanced and eaten emacs’s lunch, and I can barely understand my own .emacs anymore due to disuse. Org mode is the one thing that keeps me interested in emacs, but every time I try to get into it I get hit by emacs anachronisms. I’ve not used this tool or Roam, but are there modern org-mode front ends? Aquamacs is a macOS-flavored emacs distro, but it still intentionally feels like emacs. I’d really like an “org-mode-only” app that feels modern and lets me forget I’m using emacs under the covers.

procgen 5y ago
Logseq might fit the bill: https://logseq.com/ https://logseq.com/ I've been using it for a few weeks now after switching over from Roam and it's been great. Everything is plaintext (I use it in markdown mode, but they support org-mode).
- celeritascelery 5y ago
  I wrote a blog post about integrating org-roam with logseq [1]. Unfortunately this doesn’t work with the the new V2 org-roam update, so I am sticking with V1 for now. [1] https://coredumped.dev/2021/05/26/taking-org-roam-everywhere-with-logseq/ https://coredumped.dev/2021/05/26/taking-org-roam-everywhere...
emptysongglass 5y ago
I started from bare emacs configuration and can safely say I almost never touch a line of lisp now that I've switched to Doom emacs. I just uncomment some packages I want (like magit, org-roam, etc.) and it runs off and configures the packages in a non-conflicting manner ready for production. That's not saying banging on lisp to get your emacs into that perfect state isn't fun, just that now that I'm a capitalist worker I don't really have the time for it any more. Highly recommended.
- atty 5y ago
  I’d second Doom emacs, I consider it the best way to use Vim :D However, I am using it less and less, and I find myself using VSCode more and more. I now very rarely find myself using Doom emacs or vim. I’d say for small changes I still use them, but any time I think I’m going to be doing a significant amount of work in a directory or file, I always open it in VSCode. Not sure when that change happened, honestly.
User23 5y ago
> I was a pretty big emacs fan in undergrad about 15 years ago. Since then it seems like editors/ides have advanced and eaten emacs’s lunch, and I can barely understand my own .emacs anymore due to disuse. If I'm writing Java I'll definitely use a JVM hosted IDE like Eclipse, but other than that I'm just not seeing this. For example, I recently decided to try VSCode for a popular scripting language and if anything configuring it to work properly was actually more difficult than getting lsp-mode and few helper packages working in GNU Emacs. Spacemacs[1] is another popular "modern" Emacs distribution that you may be interested in. [1] https://www.spacemacs.org/ https://www.spacemacs.org/
kkhcxxdf 5y ago
> Since then it seems like editors/ides have advanced and eaten emacs’s lunch Citation needed, my Emacs talks to the same LSP daemon that my coworkers' VSCode instances talk to, and Emacs has a lot of text editing features VSCode doesn't Plus VSCode is just uglier, and is Microsoft and is it even GPLv3? Maybe I'm becoming irrelevant and I'm going to find myself without a job soon
- ssivark 5y ago
  I'm all for Emacs, but calling it prettier than VSCode is a bit of a stretch :D Of course aesthetic taste is quite subjective, but I think a lot of people will agree that most modern software (including VSCode) looks much slicker than Emacs (excluding extensively customized outliers). As for my personal taste, Atom is by far the visually most appealing editor I've seen. I don't know enough graphic design to articulate the difference, but I wonder why the look & feel is not replicated more widely.
  - xlii 5y ago
    > excluding extensively customized outliers I might be wrong here but extensive customization is hallmark of Emacs. I would find it very odd if someone wouldn’t customize its presentation to The Exact Way They Like.
    - neolog 5y ago
      Emacs is a text-based editor so it cannot be customized as much as a browser can.
      - useragent86 5y ago
        Emacs is a Lisp machine. Even Firefox during its XUL heyday was not as customizeable as Emacs is. Nowadays, with browsers using WebExtensions, browsers are laughably inflexible by comparison. Here are a few topics for you to consider: * Function advice (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Advising-Functions.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Ad...) * Generalized variables and the cl-letf macro (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/cl/Modify-Macros.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/cl/Modif...) * Hooks * Lisp macros in general * Special variables and dynamic binding (note that Emacs Lisp has supported lexical binding for years; some still don't know this) * Buffer-local variables * Live evaluation of Lisp code, including redefining functions and variables, vs. building and loading an extension in a browser Or maybe you were just joking, in which case, you got me good!
ssivark 5y ago
> Since then it seems like editors/ides have advanced and eaten emacs’s lunch Is that true? I know that popular editors have tons of extensions available (with VSCode leading the pack), but is any other editor as programmable and user-tweakable as Emacs? I think Atom was an attempt in that spirit, but its momentum was completely killed by VSCode. As an example, which other app will let you link to emails, or specific locations in code, in your organizational tool? I feel that Emacs puts the user in the driver's seat in a way that almost no other piece of modern software even comes close. The only comparable, in my mind, is the *nix/GNU ecosystem, and that's about as ancient as Emacs. ---- PS: One more option that hasn't been mentioned yet is Neorg (Org+Neovim). Was on HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27802153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27802153
- ssivark 5y ago
  Actually, I forgot to pay homage to LightTable. It had a fantastic vision, a compelling initial demo, and showed it was possible to radically innovate in the editor landscape. IIUC, it played a role in inspiring Atom. Pity things turned out the way they did. I sometimes feel that if the project had stuck it out for a decade with a slightly less ambitious goal, it could have really moved the computing experience forward — even if only for developers / power users.
smoldesu 5y ago
Look for Obsidian[0]. It's very similar, but operates on it's own Markdown flavour (with imports for Rome and Zettelkasten), that allows you to create pretty elaborate networks of info. [0] https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/
michaelmrose 5y ago
Such a tool would inevitably fall behind in what it supports and would lack as well useful integration. It would lack depth and breadth. If prior to 2020 it would have lacked roam support. If prior to this month it would lack roam v2. Then again its useful that org links can link to everything from a page in a document to an email which isn't possible if disconnected from the rest of the emacs ecosystem. What does it even mean for something to be "modern"?
gjvc 5y ago
"Prelude is an Emacs distribution that aims to enhance the default Emacs experience" https://prelude.emacsredux.com/en/latest/ https://prelude.emacsredux.com/en/latest/

wudangmonk 5y ago

Every time emacs comes up there's the obligatory hate rant about how they moved on to better more modern tools with vscode being praised but everytime I've tried it, its slower than emacs and crashes more often or just flat out does not work. It seems its only useful for js. I'm always on the lookout for better tools but I honestly feel there is nothing out there. My requirements are of course an emacs but better, why would anyone switch to worse tools?. It has to be faster, more stable but be customizable, its fine if it lacks features just as long as I'm allowed to add them myself. So far I haven't found anything.

CJefferson 5y ago
What are you doing that is making vscode crash? Can you reproduce it? I've never had that happen, and I am sure they would take a bug report.
- wudangmonk 5y ago
  I usually run under linux, with C or C++ codebases. I try it every 3-6 months based on recommendations I read online, it starts fine but after a while it slows/freezes/crashes. I don't bother to do reports to microsoft anymore, wasted enough time doing that with vs studio.
- iworshipfaangs2 5y ago
  VS code crashes quite often on linux for me, especially when working with files over ~4k lines.
xcambar 5y ago
Did it ever cross your mind that comments such as yours contribute to the rant you're complaining about? It really is a self-feeding flame war, and I agree with you, it's kinda annoying.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

noud 5y ago

I've seen several posts about Zettelkasten lately. What is it with this whole Zettelkast way of taking notes? How did Zettelkast become so popular out of the sudden?

coldblues 5y ago
The book "How to Take Smart Notes" and YouTube productivity gurus, most likely. I like the method, it's a natural way to structure your notes and spend more time actually writing them than categorizing.
na85 5y ago
It's a fad, just like bullet journaling was a few years ago. I'm certain that (again, like bullet journaling) underneath the hype is a decent productivity system, but you have to wade through hordes of breathless fans eager for you to click that subscribe button, etc.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  it definitely is a fad but of all the fads the backlink based 'unstructured' way to take notes is honestly a very smart idea. It's the first time I've actually stuck with note-taking because it sort of organizes itself which for me was always the biggest problem with notes.
  - useragent86 5y ago
    To me, having to manually make links between notes doesn't seem unstructured, nor does it seem self-organizing. What if it doesn't occur to me to make a link in A pointing to B? Then if I'm reading B and looking at its backlinks, how will I know it's related to A?
    - Barrin92 5y ago
      I can't speak for every implementation, but in the one I use (logseq) if you say back-link 'Podcasts' in 'Audiodrama' then in 'Audiodrama' 'Podcasts' will show up as a 'linked reference' like so (https://imgur.com/5FADCI5 https://imgur.com/5FADCI5), as well as a bi-directional connection in the graph you can get of all your links. Over time this produces something like this (https://imgur.com/6I9ojRG https://imgur.com/6I9ojRG), which is what I meant by self-organizing. Just with back-links without having to create any hierarchies (what i meant by unstructured) you get a data-structure that is actually still pretty insightful.

dangirsh 5y ago

org-roam + org-babel + emacs-jupyter has been my default literate development environment for ~1 year. This package is a hugely welcome upgrade to org-roam-server, and I'm excited to integrate it with my workflow. Thanks!!

skuthus 5y ago

You could do all this work, or you could just use https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/

iLemming 5y ago
But then, how would you insert a link (in a note) to a specific line in some codebase? In a different branch. Or a link to a specific email thread in a mailing list? How would you attach images to your notes and manage them in a git repo? How would you encrypt your notes? How do you insert current or tomorrow's date in a note? How do you find all the notes tagged with a date? ¹ Most importantly, what would you do when you accumulate several thousand notes, and suddenly Obsidian authors ask you to pay for it? Having my note taking system in Emacs has incredible benefits - I have google-translate, thesaurus, dictionary, spell-checker, Grammarly checker, etc., All right here, everything is accessible without focus and context switching. And, of course, I can change virtually any behavior of any part of the system. And I never have to worry that someday, someone would ask me to pay for "premium features". ----- ¹ I don't know, perhaps Obsidian has some of those features, and maybe they are even better and more intuitive than in Emacs, but I doubt it would ever be as versatile.
- lovecg 5y ago
  I’d love to learn more about your setup, especially how you attach images. Still tuning my own org mode config!
  - ungamedplayer 5y ago
    Not op. Use the misnamed org-download.
  - iLemming 5y ago
    Some functionality I mentioned is built-in, some is done via packages: - google-translate - mw-thesaurus - gucong/emacs-sdcv - emacs-grammarly/lsp-grammarly To make Org mode take care of versioning of attachments for you: https://orgmode.org/manual/Automatic-version_002dcontrol-with-Git.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Automatic-version_002dcontrol-wit...