IMHO you don't need org-roam to use org-mode for note-taking. I use a bunch of plain org-mode files (synchronized between my computers and mobile devices with git and Syncthing) for my notes since 2016, and for me it's the best «second brain» solution I've ever seen. LaTeX formulae! Sheet music (with LilyPond)! Of course, less exotic things like pictures, links, tags are also supported.
I tried to use org-roam, but it's too complex to adopt my already written notes to the org-roam format and structure.
Sorry, but _what exactly_ «it seems to do» from your point of view?
My «second brain» now is almost 300Mb of text, pictures, sound files, PDF and other stuff. As I already mentioned, it contains tables, mathematical formulae, sheet music, cross-references, code samples, UML diagrams and graphs in Graphviz format. It is versioned, indexed by local search engine, analyzed by AI assistant and shared between many computers and mobile devices. And (last but not least) it works: it allows me to solve my tasks way more faster than with the assistance of external, non-personalized tools (like ChatGPT, StackExchange or Google).
I know no tools for all this tasks except org-mode. Well, maybe Evernote in the 2010-s was something similar — but with less features, with more bugs and with worse interface.
Personal note-taking _is_ a complex task per se (well, at least for someone like typical HN visitor). I've seen many note-taking tools, that were ridiculously featureless, stupid and inconvenient because they were _not_ complex enough.
> Sure if one wants to do emacs-gardening it is fine.
2)Org-mode works in Emacs out of the box, you don't need any «emacs-gardening» to use org-mode.
3)The term «Emacs-gardening» itself sound a bit like hate-speech for me. The complexity of Emacs customization is overrated, mostly due to opinions of people who never used Emacs or used it in the previous millennium.
Based off my experience you should start using org-mode if you either
a) have too much time or
b) have too little time
a) because I found it to be quite a time-consuming to set up a configuration that adapts to my needs (event though I restrict myself to note taking and managing todos all from one file) and
b) it is such an amazing tool for keeping all my notes and todos in reach within seconds
I used org-mode files to save the examples of complex commands and code snippets (for example, for Docker, Kubernetes, bash, SQL and CQL). From the reader point of view it's literally documentation, although I'm not a professional technical writer and the only reader it's just myself (ok, sometimes I share some of this files with friends and family).
If you use Emacs, you will have great editor with powerful preview features (images, formatting, table processor with formulae, code execution inside the text), and the pipeline for generating HTML or PDF will be approximately the same as with .md/.rst (org-mode is even supported by GitLab and GitHub web interface, although not perfectly). But the support of the org-mode outside Emacs is worse than of Markdown and reStructuredText.
Org mode is actually a great lightweight markup format - much more standardized and rational than markdown. I maintain my knowledge base on it using org-roam. Org roam forms an easily searchable and navigable web of information. That includes everything from bookmarks and cheatsheets to daily journals. (I think obsidian does the same with markdown, but I haven't used it).
I use it for documentation, I created chicken scheme extensions as literate programming, having code, documentation, runnable examples, and tests all in the same source; then I use tangle and weave to generate the respective files.
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I tried to use org-roam, but it's too complex to adopt my already written notes to the org-roam format and structure.
My «second brain» now is almost 300Mb of text, pictures, sound files, PDF and other stuff. As I already mentioned, it contains tables, mathematical formulae, sheet music, cross-references, code samples, UML diagrams and graphs in Graphviz format. It is versioned, indexed by local search engine, analyzed by AI assistant and shared between many computers and mobile devices. And (last but not least) it works: it allows me to solve my tasks way more faster than with the assistance of external, non-personalized tools (like ChatGPT, StackExchange or Google).
I know no tools for all this tasks except org-mode. Well, maybe Evernote in the 2010-s was something similar — but with less features, with more bugs and with worse interface.
Personal note-taking _is_ a complex task per se (well, at least for someone like typical HN visitor). I've seen many note-taking tools, that were ridiculously featureless, stupid and inconvenient because they were _not_ complex enough.
> Sure if one wants to do emacs-gardening it is fine.
1)You can use org-mode outside Emacs. See for example Logseq (https://logseq.com/), organice (https://organice.200ok.ch/) or EasyOrg.
2)Org-mode works in Emacs out of the box, you don't need any «emacs-gardening» to use org-mode.
3)The term «Emacs-gardening» itself sound a bit like hate-speech for me. The complexity of Emacs customization is overrated, mostly due to opinions of people who never used Emacs or used it in the previous millennium.
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a) have too much time or b) have too little time
a) because I found it to be quite a time-consuming to set up a configuration that adapts to my needs (event though I restrict myself to note taking and managing todos all from one file) and b) it is such an amazing tool for keeping all my notes and todos in reach within seconds
Its agenda supports searching on time which is handy.
If you use Emacs, you will have great editor with powerful preview features (images, formatting, table processor with formulae, code execution inside the text), and the pipeline for generating HTML or PDF will be approximately the same as with .md/.rst (org-mode is even supported by GitLab and GitHub web interface, although not perfectly). But the support of the org-mode outside Emacs is worse than of Markdown and reStructuredText.
Can you explain? I mean, I imagine there aren't really various flavors of Org Mode, but that doesn't make it standardized.