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.

**UPDATE: **After writing this I realized what a jumbled mess it became. I’m posting it anyway because it really is intended as a way for me to think this through. I apologize for the rambling you’re about to be subjected to. I work mostly with two kinds of notes: Thoughts and Records. Thoughts are meant to be used as raw materials for new thoughts. Records are for logging events. Thoughts are most useful right now, but will also be used in the future.

UPDATE: After writing this I realized what a jumbled mess it became. I’m posting it anyway because it really is intended as a way for me to think this through. I apologize for the rambling you’re about to be subjected to._ I work mostly with two kinds of notes: Thoughts and Records. Thoughts are meant to be used as raw materials for new thoughts. Records are for logging events. Thoughts are most useful right now, but will also be used in the future.

My muscle memory is a mess. I spent years in Vim and then learned Emacs. I started with Spacemacs so that I wouldn’t be too distracted by those nutty Emacs keybindings. It helped. But I wanted to learn to configure Emacs on my own and so I powered through the learning curve and rolled my own configuration. I actually learned to (almost) enjoy the native bindings. Trouble was at that point I was stuck between worlds.

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.

Latacora: Users are encouraged to rotate their PGP keys in the same way that LARPers are encouraged to sharpen their play swords: not only does nobody do it, but the whole system would probably fall apart if everyone did. If messages can be sent in plaintext, they will be sent in plaintext. … The clearest example of this problem is something every user of encrypted email has seen: the inevitable unencrypted reply.

I’ve become catatonic over whether to use Doom Emacs or my home-rolled Emacs configuration, so I’m jotting down a few notes to help me think it through. Doom has very good defaults, looks great, and continues to fine-tune a bunch of behaviors in a way that I generally get along with. (I like it more than the other big contender, Spacemacs). On the other hand, Doom’s behavior feels out of my control and things change frequently, forcing me to pay attention to my editor in a way that I’d rather not.

Brett Terpstra, revisiting the “doing” CLI: I haven’t written much about doing since then, but I continue to use it daily. It’s come a long way. It not only creates rich logs of my time at my computer, it also handles time tracking and reporting and integrates with my system via LaunchBar, various automations, and GeekTool. You know how git log can be really useful after a long night of hacking, or a few days of being away?

Robin Sloan: For a long time, I have struggled to articulate what kind of programmer I am. I’ve been writing code for most of my life, never with any real discipline, but/and I can, at this point, make the things happen on computers that I want to make happen. At the same time, I would not last a day as a professional software engineer. Leave me in charge of a critical database and you will return to a smoldering crater.

Jethro Kuan: This is the workflow I use. Here I explain what I think note-taking should be, and why it should be this way. I implore you (especially users of Org-roam) to read this through. Jethro describes how he takes notes in Org mode and specifically how he uses org-roam. I am still deciding between Roam and org-roam so this was helpful. And remember, it’s the backlinks!

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?

Roam is “A note-taking tool for networked thoughts.” There’s nothing better than trying a new tool and having it feel immediately right. Roam thinks the way I do. Or at least it behaves in a way that makes sense to me. The world is short on tools with nicely-implemented bi-directional linking. I LOVE bi-directional linking. This is why I’ve continued using TheBrain for so many years. I connect two things and suddenly they both know about each other forever.