[Emacs] org-roam and deft

It might not come as a surprise that I am a heavy user of Emacs. One of the features I use most is org-mode for note taking, document writing, keeping a journal and my Getting Things Done workflow.

I have been experimenting with using org-roam to introduce the Zettelkasten method of note taking inspired by Roam Research.

My setup is that I store all my notes in a file share that is immediately synced to the cloud. Lets call this location /path/to/real/notes. As this path is located on an additional hard drive in my system and the path is not really handy I created a symbolic link to it in /home/arjen/notes. This means it is quite handy to access.

What happens when in org-roam when it indexes the files, it will actually resolve the symbolic links and this store any file referencing its real location (/path/to/real/notes). This seems to be solidified in Issue 518.

A really neat tool to use with org-roam is called deft (GitHub). It allows you to quickly access notes. One thing it does not do is resolve the symbolic link however. So when you load a document through deft, org-roam is not able to recognize it as it believes it is loaded from another location.

I spent some time looking into the issue and made a single line pull request to the project to fix it. The pull request is documented on GitHub.

To use my fork, until the pull request is processed, you can use straight.el (GitHub):

(use-package deft
  :straight (deft
              :type git :host github
              :repo "jrblevin/deft"
              :fork (:host github
                     :repo "credmp/deft"))
  :after org
  :bind
  ("C-c r d" . deft)
  :custom
  (deft-recursive t)
  (deft-use-filter-string-for-filename t)
  (deft-default-extension "org")
  (deft-directory "~/notes/" ))