The Downside of Using Org-Id Links in Org-Roam

In org-roam v2, a new requirement was added for all notes to have an org ID. This has a few notable downsides.

It duplicates unique identifiers. Notes already have a unique ID, the file name which is enforced to be unique by the file system. Changing a file name should be equivalent to changing a unique ID—you probably don’t want to do that (and it’s a sign you should probably delete it and start a new note).

It clutters the note. The preamble alone is a minimum of 4 lines compared to 1 before due to the addition of the :PROPERTIES: drawer.

It hurts portability. Previously, org-roam files used to ‘just work’ in Working Copy, including links to other files. It doesn’t anymore because of ID links. It also further locks the implementation in with org-mode which is lacking parsers to make it more ubiquitous (go-org is a good option, but many more are started and abandoned).

Links to this note

• Exporting Org-Mode Documents With Many Org-Id Links Is Slow

  Exporting org-mode documents using ox is very slow when there are many org-id links in the contents.

• At Mentions for Org-Mode

  A pattern I really like in Notion is that you can a @ (at) mention any page with search as you type and autocomplete. I’d like to do something similar in org-mode so that I can quickly link related headlines.

• Org-Roam Mobile

  My hunt for a mobile setup for org-roam continues. LogSeq doesn’t handle org IDs. Plain Org is buggy (syncing with Dropbox, recent file list disappears, copy and paste doesn’t work, etc.). Beorg is too slow after upgrading to iOS 17.

• Org-Roam

  An Emacs library that recreates Roam (software that implements a Zettelkasten-like system) using org-mode.