org-roam-bibtex VS Zero-to-Emacs-and-Org-roam

In addition to org-roam, I would recommend checking out https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-bibtex for attaching notes to specific papers that are indexed by an application like Zotero. Some good tutorials for it are here: https://rgoswami.me/posts/org-note-workflow/ and https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/how_to_take_smart_notes_org/ and https://emacsconf.org/2020/talks/17/ . Since current org-roam (post-v2) uses the normal org-mode "id" form, you can make any "headline" into an roam-registered node. You could then split your long derivations into different headlines, where the body of the headline or descriptive text could refer to prior nodes, but any latex is inserted using org latex blocks https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages/ob-doc-LaTeX.html . You've maybe already considered this (and I wouldn't be surprised if local references were easier to do in straight latex), but org-roam-bibtex is really nice for interfacing with your citation system for other papers.

I think you should also look org-roam and org-roam-bibtex (I can't configure org-roam-bibtex properly because I'm on Windows).

Taking this one step further, if you use the excellent org-roam package (which if you don't you should definitely check it out, its great for note-taking), there is a package called org-roam-bibtex which communicates very well with the aforementioned packages. With it, you can create bibliographic notes as part of your org-roam repository from their bibtex entry and initialize the file to also include a link to the pdf from org-noter. Once you learn it, its a very powerful and streamlined workflow for working with articles which makes your life very easy. Its quite a bit of reading to do on your end on how to make all these work together, but trust me its worth it.

Have you followed the discussion here: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-bibtex/issues/159

If you want to use it primarily for literature notes, maybe you should have a look at the current state of https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-bibtex/tree/org-roam-v2 before deciding.

Alternatively, I have had success with this way https://github.com/nobiot/Zero-to-Emacs-and-Org-roam/blob/v1/100.pdf-tools-org-noter.md

Have you seen this? https://github.com/nobiot/Zero-to-Emacs-and-Org-roam It's still a work-in-progress but it may be along the lines of what you're looking for.

Personally, I wouldn't recommend setting up org-roam at first. It's excellent, but it's just going to be too daunting for a beginner when combined with all the other things. I'd start by just learning emacs and org-mode. Core org-mode has enough functionality built-in to start building knowledgebases, and the org-mode manual is excellent. You can add-in org-roam later. (And you might find that org-roam is overkill and something like howm mode to get backlinks is enough.) The beauty of emacs is that you can move your notes from one system to another easily.

You might like this... it's written for Windows users: https://github.com/nobiot/Zero-to-Emacs-and-Org-roam It's a work in progress, but the defaults suggested are good.

Zero-to-Emacs-and-Org-roam/115.How-to-enable-insert-image-from-clipboard.md at v1 · nobiot/Zero-to-Emacs-and-Org-roam

I'm new to org-roam and trying to use v2 directly. My process is currently looking at the excellent manual (https://www.orgroam.com/manual.html) and intro (https://github.com/nobiot/Zero-to-Emacs-and-Org-roam) for v1 and trying to map these to v2. But as I managed to install org-roam and emacsql-sqlite3 in Android/Termux just yesterday evening, I can't say if it's useable enough.

For Windows, I have done this. So far, it works really well

My primary goal is to keep notes organized, portable and "connected" using Emacs, so focus is still on it and in few days I think I will have my favorite setup using Emacs + Org + roam. In the process I discovered Zero-to-Emacs-and-Org-roam - kudos to the creator - really helped me.