org roam - how to find note by content?
reddit / emacs

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pailanderCO · 2022-02-04 23:02

Is there a way of finding an org roam note by its text (not by its
title nor tags)? I've been using fzf for that, but it isn't pretty.

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emage_ · 2022-02-05 00:42

If you're using consult there's a useful consult-ripgrep function, or
you can make your own ripgrep function.

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pailanderCO · 2022-02-05 01:05

>consult-ripgrep

Thanks for the tip. I found an example of it here: https://org-
roam.discourse.group/t/using-consult-ripgrep-with-org-roam-for-
searching-notes/1226

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FOSSbflakes · 2022-02-05 08:14

I gather been using Deft personally which has been fine, though I hear
it doesn't scale well

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Kartoshk · 2022-02-05 08:52

As already mentioned "consult-ripgrep" is awesome and powerful.

One additional thought that I hope would helpful - org-roam is
specifically tries to have minimal functionality and delegates /a lot/
of things to org-mode, or general tools in emacs.

So for future questions if it's not something that specifically about
backlinks, but could just as well be a question about "multiple org
files in directory", or just " multiple text files"
- asking more general questions you might find more help and more
quickly

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pailanderCO · 2022-02-05 13:56

I've also used Deft before, but as far as I know it only searches in
the titles (and/or tags), not in the contents.

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[deleted] · 2022-02-05 14:41

It definitely searches content. I was going to recommend it.

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ftrx · 2022-02-05 19:00

It search full-text, but do not like the ID/drawer *before* #+title:
in notes, there are AFAIK some hacks to circumvent that but...
ripgrapping the org-roam-directory is much nicer/faster IMO/IME :-)

Also you might like considering org-ql to access your notes out of
queries on metadata, that's a long shot since you need to craft them
along with proper queries, but might be really useful sometime,
suppose for instance you have a note a contract and a day you are
willing to know all contracts you have: org-ql can answer other
methods can't do much...

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pailanderCO · 2022-02-05 21:47

Yeah, you're right. I had to turn regex incremental search on.

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pailanderCO · 2022-02-05 21:48

I'll give a look at org-ql. Thanks.

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ftrx · 2022-02-05 22:36

Your welcome :-)

my suggestion is trying something like

    * A book title
    :PROPERTIES:
    :ID:       2e48ead7-203e-546d-b02c-3970bf75046a
    :kind:     book
    :year:     2019
    :publisher: Independently published
    :language: english
    :author:   Foo Bar
    :END:


    [[elisp:(org-ql-search (org-agenda-files) '(and (property "kind"
"book") (property "year" "2019")) :title "My book(s) notes")][click to
see all books notes I made in 2019]]

Of course with few "books note" spread in various notes (I've used
org-agenda-files for where to search, but it can be anything, for
instance `(file-expand-wildcards "~/my/notes/*.org")`) and the query
again somewhere also in scratch buffer.

Org-ql do support an interactive usage, but writing like queries IMO
it's not hyper natural even in non-lisp-y form, while keeping queries
and yasnippets/templates for relevant headings, together, help to
group different headings/notes with various criteria and you can just
click on them as needed. Contracts is an example, for instance with an
`:active: yes` and `:kind: contract` properties, books another, many
others equivalent are possible depending of your org-mode usage. It's
also possible to output query results in a buffer, as an org-table,
but so far I failed to find a use-case for that... Another option is
`M-x org-ql-view` with queries hard-coded in Emacs config and
presented as a search&narrow list ivy/consult/helm/* style.

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paretoOptimalDev · 2022-05-10 16:04

Full text search with sqlite could easily be added I think.

I created an issue:

https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam/issues/2187

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pailanderCO · 2022-05-10 17:52

Good! Thanks.