Dotfiles VS zetteldesk.el

For describing my workflow very briefly (not as well as Sonke Ahrens in the aforementioned book, but I will try), I try to follow the main points of Zettelkasten. Whenever you learn something, take notes about it. Make the notes brief, but very descriptive. Give it a large title describing everything contained in it so you can find it easier later. If its too large, split it into multiple files, so the note is atomic (meaning it can no longer be separated into multiple files). If you don't have time to write a note correctly, make a fleeting note about it to remind you and write it later. Densely link your notes with one another. Thinking about the connections between notes is sometimes half the work of writing it. This way, I never lose information. If I need something later down the line, I can always search with org-roam-node-find, as I use very descriptive titles as I mentioned. If not, there is also grep, which if you are not aware is a text editing utility that allows for searching all your notes. There are many grep tools in Emacs (i.e. counsel-rg being the one I use personally). For more explanation, you can check my literate org-mode config.

There is definitely a way to do this in Citar which should be mentioned in the wiki if you read through it (and if there is not the author of the package is very helpful in general) but I do not know what that is. This way, when you select a bibtex entry it will automatically create a note with the title being the title of the article, automatically associate the entry with its pdf and ready org-noter for use to annotate it. Its a very streamlined and automated way to work with this system of packages that I highly recommend. For more info on this, you can also look at my literate config for notetaking which naturally has a lot as I take tons of notes. Link to it is here.

For more info on my workflow, you can check my config over on github. This part is specific to my org roam, references and general note taking workflow, so you won't have to look for the relevant parts. Its a literate config and I explain some things more than I do here. If this all interests you I suggest giving it a check. I also couldn't recommend Ahrens' book more. Its an incredible read for academics of every science as its really applicable everywhere imo.

Also if something is not clear here you can check out my full i3 config over on github.

For publishing stuff, Emacs has a very rich ecosystem. Org-export libraries are very powerful and allow you to export to virtually any format you desire. There is also org-publish for publishing your work, which works very well. However, when you have a bunch of org-roam nodes, it is not so easy to export all of them. I have personally created a tool for gathering a lot of your org-roam nodes in one file, your so-called "desktop" which can be used for revision of topics, writing manuscripts for articles or just straight up publishing your notes. You can find it here.

Hey, this is a bit of a self plug, but since I had the exact same problem with you, I am pretty sure I have exactly what you are looking for. Last year, I wrote zetteldesk.el and one of its core functionalities is exactly collecting a set of org-roam nodes and adding them to a buffer in a specific order so you can revise them as you like.

If your problems are just filtering and sorting your notes, then you should have no trouble. You can even insert them in a temporary buffer and view them all simultaneously. Albeit completely unrelated to daily notes, I recently wrote a package to solve this exact problem you describe, but instead of daily notes, I wanted to filter an arbitrary selection of notes. You can check it out here, the source might give you some inspiration for how to do what you want. Ripgrep is an excellent tool for searching your notes, but what you are asking for isn't really its use case I feel, you want more of a filter, not a search tool.

Not sure what you mean on the first one. The second one's easiest solution is probably org-transclusion as what you're asking is to translude notes. But other packages with a similar concept of collecting your notes and adding them in a separate buffer are things such as delve or (shameless self plug) zetteldesk. I got no clue how to do the third one. I agree with you on that todos should work in more places, but I also don't know how to fix it. For the one with the calendar, I am pretty sure calfw has an extension that does that. I think calfw-org?

Last week, I released my new emacs package zetteldesk.el and made a post here for showcasing it. The idea was rather well accepted but I got a lot of feedback, that the README was too dense in information and it was hard for a new user to try it. I have tried fixing this, by integrating gifs for demonstrations instead of the raw info (which I moved to the wiki for anyone wanting it), adding a set of default bindings in the form of a hydra and a small sample config to get you started.

Link: https://github.com/Vidianos-Giannitsis/zetteldesk.el