I’ve recently switched from using Org-roam to using Denote for my notes. Org-roam is powerful and cool, but I prefer the more straightforward approach of Denote.

I keep all my notes in Denote, including notes about current projects. For example, we’re planning to remodel our kitchen. This is a project and so I have a Denote file named “20221130T130143–kitchen-remodel-2023__house_project.org”. In this file, I keep a list of TODOs. In order to see these TODOs in my Org Agenda, I need to add the file to org-agenda-files. This can be done a few ways, but all are manual. I am forgetful, so I wanted a more automated way to keep my org-agenda-files up to date with Denote projects.

You’ll notice that I highlight short phrases in many of my daily post entries here. I think this makes it easier to scan things later. The HTML markup for this is just a styled <mark> tag wrapping the text to be highlighted.

I write my posts in Org-mode and convert them to Hugo-compatible Markdown using ox-hugo. The path from Org-mode to HTML for this is a little convoluted, so I cheat and use a macro to generate the markup.

I’ve kept a list of books I’ve read as a plain text (well, technically, Markdown) file for years. I wrote about it here. The public version is rendered using Github Pages at books.baty.net. This is fine, but at some point last year I also started logging books in an Org mode file, just to see how it felt. It felt pretty good!

Org-roam is “A plain-text personal knowledge management system” using Emacs and Org-mode and I put nearly all my notes in there. While it’s easy to find notes in org-roam based on filename, there’s no obvious way to search the contents of notes. Weird, right?