hell \ Rebekah Hellberg8h ago
does #emacs users actually exist or are they just this mythical creatures that everyone claims to have seen? it seems like such a cool software.
Show threadMark Crocker8h ago

@hell I used #Emacs for fifteen years back in the day. I abandoned it for jEdit, which never quite rose to its potential, then switched to a variety of IDE's for serious work with jEdit as a fallback for small jobs.

Now I've dusted off Emacs for #Notes and ToDo's using #OrgRoam with #OrgRoamUI on top of #OrgMode. Unlike Freeplane, which I used before, this can be set up on a GrapheneOS phone and is a killer app for me. I like that it's an open source #LocalFirst text mode #PKM without lock-in

Show threadthetemp8h ago
@mcrocker What do you use for Org-roam notes on your phone? Are you using the one-file-per-note approach or all notes in a single file?
Show threadMark Crocker

@thetemp org-roam seems to encourage lots of notes. However, some users report that the database slows down when the node count gets over 20,000 nodes.

Each file has an ID, but linkable ID's can be assigned to any headline, so you could mix and match the approaches easily.

org-roam-ui treats all ID's as nodes, so both approaches produce the same graph.

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11:44pmWeb
Show threadMark Crocker7h ago

@thetemp I found, in practice, that when a note gets long and I found that I needed links from other note files to subsections, which is only supported by ID links, that it worked much better if I broke it up into multiple files, but it makes search slightly less convenient.

There's a way to create custom links so I could technically create a link that let's me link to a headline search in a particular node (rather than filename), but creating an ID for that case seems more canonical.

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Show threadMark Crocker6h ago

@thetemp I almost forgot to mention that to successfully use Emacs on an AOSP based platform, you really need a keyboard that let's you enter special keys like ESC, control, meta, Del, and others.

Unless you have a huge phone, folding phone or tablet, the Hacker's keyboard is a little awkward. I like The Unexpected Keyboard ⁨https://f-droid.org/packages/juloo.keyboard2/⁩ for funky key entry and I use HeliBoard https://f-droid.org/packages/helium314.keyboard for swiping text quickly.

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Show threadthetemp4h ago
@mcrocker It's something I've been thinking about lately. My system is one big org file right now, but I'm trying to think about how useful it will be in 30 or so years, and I'm just not sure that one big org file will continue to work well as decades of volume adds to the parsing time. Something that relies more on file-searching could be more future-proof than my current setup I suspect.
Show threadthetemp4h ago
@mcrocker Thank you for the insight regarding Org-roam. I have also read that Denote can become slower in some ways as a directory's list of notes becomes extremely long. There is no 100% perfect solution I suppose. Just a guessing game about which approaches will get faster over time than they are now.
Show threadMark Crocker4h ago

@thetemp the biggest long term problem has always been portability, not features or performance.

I've used many ToDo list programs and organizers over decades and all of them have been discontinued at some. Even those that claimed portability, like SLYK compatability, turned out to be very difficult to migrate away from.

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Show threadMark Crocker4h ago

@thetemp

That's why I choose Freeplane over a decade ago. It was totally open, had a Groovy scripting API, and saved all data in a (mostly) human readable XML format that could be processed externally.

However, it had limitations. It was fine for ToDo lists, but not note taking. Although, I could export a view as an SVG file that I could view in a mobile browser. I could not do data entry or modifications practically, on a mobile platform.

So, org-roam seemed like a good next step.

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