As you probably know, I struggle with where to keep my notes. For a few months now it’s been a battle between Org-roam and Roam. Org-roam has been in the lead, mostly due to Roam being unstable and (soon to be) expensive. Also, my infatuation with Org mode is on again. Using Emacs takes work on my part. It takes mental energy. I’m nearly always OK with that, because Emacs has Org mode and Org mode beats everything at what it does. On the other hand, sometimes I’m lazy or tired. I just want to lean back and point-and-click my way around. That’s not how Emacs works. I wrote earlier that, “Getting to a link I have stored in Org-roam takes me about five seconds longer than the same link in Roam.” In other words, Emacs with Org mode (and by extension, Org-roam) is better, but it’s a lot harder. ...

It’s been a challenging week for me using Roam. For the past several days my Roam database simply wouldn’t load. I’d see the spinning Astrolabe forever. Deleting the site data in my browser and restarting would help for a time, but then it would happen again. What I’ve come to learn is that I need my Roam database available to me all the time. I understand that Roam is still in beta, but here we are. ...

I just learned that Org-roam supports aliases. This means that I can reference pages in my Org-roam database in more than one way. For example, I might want to have a page for “World War II” but when mentioning it I would just use “WWII”. It’s done like this… #+TITLE: World War II #+ROAM_ALIAS: "WWII" "World War 2" This is really handy. Even “real” Roam doesn’t support this as easily yet. ...

A quick rundown the chaos in my head around Roam and Emacs and how it has affected my day so far. 6:00am Realize on the way to work that Roam just isn’t a great idea for holding my (hopefully) long-term “second brain”. $30/month forever in a proprietery blah-de-blah? Nope, and by the way org-roam is perfectly suited for this. I want long-term stability and control for this sort of thing and what could be more long-term-stable than Emacs and plain text files, right? ...