Finding Howm notes with Org-node

As a huge fan of Denote, I still sometimes dabble with other ways of taking notes in Emacs.

For example, I like the way Howm does notes. I have a growing set of Howm notes, but they feel isolated from my other notes. For a while, I tried keeping Denote and Howm together but it felt like swimming upstream. I bailed on that and broke them apart again.

More recently, I learned about an Org-roam-alike called Org-node. I like org-node quite a lot. There are no enforced file name rules, as in Denote. Any Org-mode heading or file can be a node. All one needs to do is give it an ID property. It’s very fast at finding notes. I pointed org-node at my entire ~/org directory. Finding a node is still basically instant.

This got me thinking about Howm again. If I were to add an ID to new Howm notes, I could browse them in the cool, modified-date way that Howm uses, while also making them linkable/searchable with org-node. It doesn’t matter where the files are within ~/org. Another advantage is that org-node uses the more standard [id: ] linking method rather than Denote’s [denote: ] links.

To make this easy, I added a hook in the use-package configuration for Howm, like so…

:hook
  ((howm-mode . howm-mode-set-buffer-name)
   (howm-create . org-node-nodeify-entry)  ;; <-- add to org-node
   (org-mode . howm-mode))

That’s it. With that hook, new Howm notes automatically call org-node-nodeify-entry, which does the right thing. with the file’s front matter. I’m going to try this for a while and see how it goes.