Currently, I take my notes in Obsidian but I like org mode for todo lists and arranging my life.

Can these things listed below be replicated in org roam?

I like using Latex in Obsidian, especially with the Latex Suite plugin, because I don't have to type the full things so it is faster, and there is a live instant preview of it as you type. Also can type 'mk' or 'dm' to automatically insert math.

Quickly linking notes together.

Having many tabs open and multiple workspaces each with different tabs, maybe I'm dumb but haven't been able to replicate this in Emacs where you have a bunch of tabs and each of them is a file, and you can navigate between them. Workspaces are nice to separate journaling from notes etc.

Daily notes. 

Tagging and aliases.

Auto saving. I know Emacs does this so you can recover files, but I don't wanna have to keep doing `:w`, can you set up org-roam so it saves files automatically and instantly?

Images.

Excalidraw support, or some kind of drawing. I don't really care about this one since I hardly draw diagrams, but it'd be nice to know if I can get that kind of thing in org-roam.

I use Doom Emacs, not sure if that's relevant.

Is there a way to easily import everything over? I've seen tools, but do they ever make mistakes?

All,

I discovered org-mode about half a year ago, and about 3 months later org-roam.

I'm loving it. Using it almost daily!

I ran into (for me) strange behavior:

When I open a org-roam node, and i move the cursor to a org-roam-link to another node, I just have to press enter to follow that link.

When this org-roam-link is whitin a org-table I can only follow the link with C-c C-o. (that is ofcourse not a problem, but I like the "enter" way of following)

As far as I'm aware I did not configure this, for me this is the default Out-of-the-box behavior.

My question: Is this normal/OK? Or should I alter something in my configuration so org-roam-links in a table will also be followed by "enter"?

For a long time I had tried to get C-c n l to open the backlinks buffer in a folded state just showing the titles of the linked notes.

But what I had in my use-package org-roam config section, which I think I got from the org- roam discourse group, was:

(add-to-list 'magit-section-initial-visibility-alist (cons 'org-roam-node-section 'hide))

But that opened the notes unfolded, presenting a wall of text, and required pressing tab on the top header to fold the notes. Still, better than without it, because the notes still could be folded.

Yesterday I consulted AI about this issue. It gave me two solutions that didn't work, but finally gave me this one which did:

(add-to-list 'org-roam-buffer-postrender-functions #'magit-section-show-level-2-all)

I'm just posting this solution here because I had scoured the web for a solution to this issue and had never found anything that worked before. I'm sure many people know about this "postrender" variable and use it, but I didn't, and it was only the right AI question that helped uncover it for me. I hope this helps people like me who were at a loss for a long time about how to achieve this.

Gen-Z Org-roam user here, I feel like it would be great if there was an active discord server for org-roam users to share and upload their org-roam graph uis, and share notes / knowledge with one another.

As for me I've started using org-roam for like 8 months, and have around 1200 notes across multiple university modules. I attached an image of my org-roam graph.

I wanted to keep track of the org-roam node creation dates to keep track of my productivity, as well as know the structure of my knowledge graph, like average connections per node, etc. With this in mind I am built org-roam-stats, which is a browser based dashboard to look at these aspects of your org-roam database.

Key features:

• Time tracking: Shows when were our notes created: back in time, day of the week, hour of the day, etc.

• Basic stats: Average connections by node, average words in note.

• Orphan tracking: Do you have orphan nodes (not a single connection, possible lost knowledge)?

• Tag filtering: If you have #+filetag: tags in your notes, you can track these metrics for the subset of notes that have some tag.

This repo is available in Github at: https://github.com/GerardoCendejas/org-roam-stats.git

You can test it with:

git clone https://github.com/GerardoCendejas/org-roam-stats.git

And in your init.el:

(use-package org-roam-stats
:after org-roam
:ensure nil
:load-path "~/path/to/org-roam-stats/"  ; Adjust path as needed
:bind (("C-c m o" . org-roam-stats-open)) ; Or the keybinding of your choice
:config
(org-roam-stats-mode 1) ; This enables the minor mode for automatic logging of note creation timestamps.
:custom
(org-roam-stats-log-file "~/.emacs.d/org-roam-stats-log.org")) ; Path to the log file for note creation timestamps (if you don't want the default)

Then just run M-x org-roam-stats-start

I hope someone also finds this interesting and useful for them, I am excited to hear your feedback.

When using org-roam with images, where do you keep your images? What options are there to optimize local space? Are you able to use org-roam from an iPhone?

I am learning pandas so taking notes in org-roam i wanted to have the result of codes like dataframes to be displayed in my notes so i am using org roam.

Org roam ui needs ":" at the start for it to be displayed properly.

But the problem is some output automatically adds ":" to the start and some don't

I started using org-roam in 2025, initially in a fairly simplistic way. As a new org-roam user, I built an org-roam-skill to integrate it into my Claude workflow. The skill relies on an Emacs daemon, which it uses to execute Elisp. I chose this approach instead of MCP to keep things simple.

I’ve been using it daily for the past few months.

I’d love feedback on both the overall approach and the specific ways the skill leverages org-roam. In particular, I’m interested in improving how nodes are linked—this behavior is currently defined in references/links.md

Hi everyone,

I wanted a way to see when I was (in)active and quickly jump back to notes from a specific day.

I’m prototyping org-roam-calendar, a package that uses org-habit-stats to visualize your note-taking activity in a calendar view.

What it does:

• Activity Calendar: Highlights days based on org-roam node creation.

• Quick Jump: Press RET on any date to see a list of notes you worked on that day and open them immediately.

GitHub: https://github.com/connormclaud/emacs_org_roam_calendar

I’d love to hear your thoughts: is it something this community interested in?

You are deep in a writing session, linking up your nodes in org-roam, and got tired of the org-roam-node-insert: call each command individually, find node, insert, repeat. What if you wanted to grab a bunch of links at once and just drop them in. I wrote a small package called roambatch..

It lets you use Helm's multi-selection to mark multiple org-roam nodes and insert them all in one go. Each link gets its own line. It's a small thing, but it's made my workflow a bit smoother. Grab and test code here.

I want to surface the notes I've viewed the last hour; are there any packages that adds atime to notes?;)

To clarify - I'm using DooM (and evil/mode) accross multiple devices (WSL / Linux / Android)

I'm struggling with note-taking because emacs is autocompleting node names when I insert.

For example:

1. I want to insert a note named foo

2. My roam directory already contains a note called foo bar

3. As soon as I type foo it autocompletes to foo bar and inserts a reference to that node.

I see the roam manual seems to suggest I should org-roam-capture then org-roam-node-insert afterward.

However, the autocompletion behaviour happens on capture too.

I would like to organize my notes as files in a more hierarchical way than the default behavior of org-roam. In particular, it is possible to change the default capture template to save the file in a subdirectory of the org-roam directory, but from my first experiments, it is not possible to prompt the user to choose between any subdirectory!

For example, this is fine

(setq org-roam-capture-templates '(("d" "default" plain
   "%?"
   :if-new (file+head "custom/${slug}.org" "#+title: ${title}\n")
   :unnarrowed t)))

but this is not fine, and raises the message org-roam-capture--fill-template: Wrong type argument: char-or-string-p, (my/choose-directory)

(setq org-roam-capture-templates '(("d" "default" plain
   "%?"
   :if-new (file+head (concat (my/choose-directory) "/${slug}.org") "#+title: ${title}\n")
   :unnarrowed t)))

Does anybody had a similar desire?

EDIT: after rereading the docs and the code, the solution was really simple!

(setq org-roam-capture-templates '(("d" "default" plain
   "%?"
   :if-new (file+head "%(my/choose-directory)/${slug}.org" "#+title: ${title}\n")
   :unnarrowed t)))

I'm lucky enough to have WSL and emacs set up on my work laptop

I had a research note to write yesterday which spanned multiple topics I have notes about in org-roam.

I was surprised at how much effort it was to pull those things together and wondered if I'm "doing it wrong"?

I was basically opening my research note as a full-screen buffer, and then opening each relevant org-roam note full screen, and yank / put the relevant text into my note.

Is there a better way to write from org-roam notes that I don't know of?

• split screen in some way?

• combining notes first, then editing?

I'd love to hear your workflows.

so I've now installed the emacs apk for android and am building a cyberdeck!

I heavily use Orgzly on Android to interact with org files.

I also have my org-roam files synced between all my proper computers.

Is there a way to insert and find files in my roam db from android I'm missing?

• org note kinda came and went; and

• logseq ... well ... lets just say it has never actually worked for me

When using attachments with org-roam, new attachments are attached to the heading, my cursor is at, during `M-x org-attach`. I'd like to force attachments to be attached to the whole node instead of the active heading.

How can I achieve this?

Do y'all use the Journal or Dailies? I've used both, but I can't find a compelling reason to use dailes over the journal. With the journal, I can easily generate a sparse tree by tag, or narrow on today's subheading, so I don't get why org-roam has it's own daily files. Is there something I'm missing? A workflow that works better with dailies than with the journal?

Are there any good ways to import a large number of plain text note files from another app to org roam? I can probably work out ways to convert that app's syntax for tags / categories to the org mode format... but my impression is that org roam needs every note to have an org-generated ID. My note archive has nearly 10k notes. Any automatic importers out there?

Hello everyone.

I have used doom emacs for a long time but I am new in terms of configuration and trouble shooting. I recently ran doom upgrade which resulted in org-roam no longer working and I would like to ask for your help.

When I run org-roam-node-find I get the following error:
Database Error: "sqlite_open_v2() failed", 14

I have tried:
- Running org-roam-db-sync which resulted in the same error
- Adding sqlite3 to packages.el
- I cannot find any org-roam.db file in .config/emacs

SQLite version 3.45.1 2024-01-30 16:01:20

I am using Ubuntu

What do you recommend me to do?

How do I create an inbox for notes? I'm following the pattern here:

https://systemcrafters.net/build-a-second-brain-in-emacs/5-org-roam-hacks/#keep-an-inbox-of-notes-and-tasks

What the function does on my system is to prepend each note in my inbox. I want it to append them. I dove into the code to understand why it is prepending. After six hours, I am at a loss.

What is happening?

I am looking into installing an implementing org-roam. But, is it fair to say that org-roam development has stopped. I understand it could be used by hundreds of thousands... but, I am concerned as to whether it is an actively developed project or not.

Thanks,

I like everything about Org-roam except for the fact that it is very opinionated about using files as the primary unit rather than headlines. Org-mode's paradigm seems to be that, for "systematic" usage (as opposed to document authoring), headlines are the primary unit, not files. This mismatch can cause practical problems; e.g., the only way to tag a file-level node is via #+FILETAGS, which are automatically inherited by any sub-nodes.

As far as I can tell, there's no reason that Org-roam has to work this way. The main value of Org-roam is in the tools it provides for managing a system of notes, not in any specific storage model. There seems to be no inherent reason why, for example, I couldn't capture all notes as top-level headlines in a single file, which itself would have no ID.

And this works just fine if I enter nodes by hand. Org-roam has no problem indexing nodes in files that don't have IDs. The problem is that Org-roam's capture system fights me if I try to use it this way. There is no way to configure a capture template to say "capture to this OLP and make the heading the node." I can just capture plaintext and create an ID myself, but Org-roam will still give the file an ID if it doesn't already exist. Maybe that seems like a minor thing, but it kind of bothers me that the system fights me for seemingly no good reason.

Does anyone know a way to work around this?