org-roam-ui: a graphical frontend for your org-roam Zettelkasten

Table of Contents

• Changelog
• Installation
  • Using package.el
  • Doom
  • straight/use-package
• Usage
• Disclaimers ‼
• FAQ 🗨
• Features ✨
  • Planned features
• Supporting org-roam-ui
  • Feedback
  • Contribute 💪
    • Hacktoberfest
  • Donate
    • Sponsors

Org-Roam-UI is a frontend for exploring and interacting with your org-roam notes.

Org-Roam-UI is meant a successor of org-roam-server that extends functionality of org-roam with a Web app that runs side-by-side with Emacs.

Changelog

For major new features/bugfixes we will update changelog.

Installation

org-roam-ui is on MELPA!

org-roam-ui requires org-roam, websocket, simple-httpd, f and Emacs >= 27 for fast JSON parsing.

package.el

M-x package-install org-roam-ui

No configuration is necessary when you use package.el to install ORUI.

Doom

Add the following to your package.el

Org-roam-ui tries to keep up with the latest features of org-roam, which conflicts with Doom Emacs's desire for stability. To make sure nothing breaks, use the latest version of org-roam by unpinning it.

(unpin! org-roam)
(package! org-roam-ui)

Then something along the following to your config.el

(use-package! websocket
    :after org-roam)

(use-package! org-roam-ui
    :after org-roam ;; or :after org
;;         normally we'd recommend hooking orui after org-roam, but since org-roam does not have
;;         a hookable mode anymore, you're advised to pick something yourself
;;         if you don't care about startup time, use
;;  :hook (after-init . org-roam-ui-mode)
    :config
    (setq org-roam-ui-sync-theme t
          org-roam-ui-follow t
          org-roam-ui-update-on-save t
          org-roam-ui-open-on-start t))

We recommend only loading org-roam-ui after loading org(-roam) as starting the server and making database requests can impact startup times quite a lot.

straight/use-package

(use-package org-roam-ui
  :straight
    (:host github :repo "org-roam/org-roam-ui" :branch "main" :files ("*.el" "out"))
    :after org-roam
;;         normally we'd recommend hooking orui after org-roam, but since org-roam does not have
;;         a hookable mode anymore, you're advised to pick something yourself
;;         if you don't care about startup time, use
;;  :hook (after-init . org-roam-ui-mode)
    :config
    (setq org-roam-ui-sync-theme t
          org-roam-ui-follow t
          org-roam-ui-update-on-save t
          org-roam-ui-open-on-start t))

Usage

Use M-x org-roam-ui-mode RET to enable the global mode. It will start a web server on http://127.0.0.1:35901/ and connect to it via a WebSocket for real-time updates.

Commands

ORUI provides a few commands for interacting with the graph without ever having to leave Emacs. NOTE: This is quite janky at the moment and will change in the future. Consider this more of a teaser.

Moving around

(org-roam-ui-node-zoom)

Zooms to the current node in the global view ignoring local mode.

(org-roam-ui-node-local)

Opens the current node in local view.

You can optionally give these command three parameters:

1. the node id you want to zoom to (by default the current node)
2. The speed at which you want to zoom (can be set in the UI) in ms.
3. The padding of the zoom in px.

These options might not work at the moment, please configure them in the UI for the time being.

Manipulating graph

(org-roam-ui-add-to-local-graph &optional id)

Adds the node with the given id to the local graph. If no id is given, the current node is used. If the local graph is not open, it will be opened.

(org-roam-ui-remove-from-local-graph &optional id)

Removes the node with the given id from the local graph. If no id is given, the current node is used.

Configuration

Org-Roam-UI exposes a few variables, but most of the customization is done in the web app.

Following

ORUI follows you around Emacs by default. To disable this, set

(setq org-roam-ui-follow nil)

or disable the minor mode org-roam-ui-follow-mode.

Updating

We plan to make updates to the graph happen smoothly, at the moment it is only possible to reload the entire graph when an update happens (but local mode is preserved). This is enabled by default, to disable

(setq org-roam-ui-update-on-save nil)

Theme

Org-Roam-UI can sync your Emacs theme! This is the default behavior, to disable it do

(setq org-roam-ui-sync-theme nil)

Then call M-x orui-sync-theme.

You can also provide your own theme if you do not like syncing nor like the default one. To do so, set org-roam-ui-custom-theme to an alist of (rather specific) variables, like so

(setq org-roam-ui-custom-theme
    '((bg . "#1E2029")
        (bg-alt . "#282a36")
        (fg . "#f8f8f2")
        (fg-alt . "#6272a4")
        (red . "#ff5555")
        (orange . "#f1fa8c")
        (yellow ."#ffb86c")
        (green . "#50fa7b")
        (cyan . "#8be9fd")
        (blue . "#ff79c6")
        (violet . "#8be9fd")
        (magenta . "#bd93f9")))

You can optionally provide (base1 . "#XXXXXX") arguments after the last one to also set the background shades, otherwise ORUI will guess based on the provides bg and fg.

Open on start

By default, org-roam-ui will try to open itself in your default browser. To disable this, set

(setq org-roam-ui-open-on-start nil)

Disclaimers ‼

• We only support org-roam v2; v1 will never be supported.
• As the name suggests, Org-Roam-UI only works with org-roam! If you organize your notes in some other form org-roam-ui cannot work, as it uses org-roam to fetch all the connections.
• Feature-parity with org-roam-server is not the goal. Although we aim to make a similar product which is having a visual graph to help you explore and navigate your org-roam nodes, we do not intend to replicate all of the, nor be limited to replicating the features of org-roam-server.
• This is alpha software: please do give it a try and use it, but expect bugs and troubleshooting!
• The project was created by a couple of tinkerers to scratch their own itch. We don't get rewarded in any material way and development may stop any day (because life). The best way to keep the project alive is to explore the code and contribute!

FAQ 🗨

Q: Aaaaand it broke: what do?

Sorry! This is still alpha software, so expect it to break from time to time. Best thing you can try is to remove your settings by going to "Storage > Local Storage" on Firefox or "Application > Local Storage" on Chromium and deleting everything there.

If the issue still persists, please file a bug report with

1. Your browsers console log
2. Your browsers
3. What you were doing when it broke

and we'll try to help you ASAP!

Q: Clicking 'Open in Emacs' gives an error around json-parse-string, how do I fix this?

If you receive an error, in emacs, stating function definition is void json-parse-string, then you must compile emacs with json support. This is not automatically done on systems such as Gentoo.

Q: Graph Slow! Faster?

While we try to optimize the display of the graph, there is only so much we can do. For largish networks (>2k nodes) dragging the graph around a lot can cause some performance issues, but there are a few things you can do to speed it up.

Close the tweaks panel

At the time of writing (Aug 8) it is very much not optimized, and shifting between global and local mode or 2d or 3d is noticeably slower with the tweaks panel open than without. This will be fixed in a future release.

Use a Chromium based browser

As much as it saddens us to say, Firefox's rendering engine is quite a bit slower than its Chromium cousins. Compare the performance of the two and see if that's the main issue first.

Turn off the particles

I know, very cool to see those little guys travel up and down your notes, but very slow, especially in 3D mode.

Turn off labels

Probably the second slowest thing to render, with little possibility of speeding it up. Consider only turning on labels on highlight or cranking up the "Label appearance scale".

Turn off highlight animations

I know, they're gorgeous, but not very performant.

Turn off collision

Nice, but costly! If you like to have the graph more spread out, turning off collision will change little in the resulting layout, but will help performance quite a bit.

Turn off gravity

Fewer forces fewer worries

Favor 2D over 3D

I know, it looks cool, but man is it slow.

Don't drag the dang thing around so much!

In our experience, once the graph has actually settled and nothing needs to be rendered again, looking around should pose little trouble. At the moment there is no way of "saving" the graph configuration, but we are exploring the possibility. The graph layout algorithm is deterministic however, so barring any changes to the data it should produce the same results each time.

Q: Will you implement X?

Hopefully, yeah! But time is limited, and so is the amount of features we can cram into this things before it implodes in itself, so we are adding things incrementally to make sure they work. That said, we'd love to hear from you! If your feature is not already on the project board, please post minor feature requests such as "I want to be able to color this specific node" in the minor feature requests discussion and major feature requests (e.g. "I want to publish my graph) in the major feature requests discussion or upvote those already posted, this way we can adjust our priorities somewhat!

Q: This doesn't work with org-roam v1/org-brain/Zettledelft!

Correct! We only support org-roam v2, although we might introduce a backend agnostic implementation later.

Features ✨

Org-roam-ui's main feature is the ability to generate a graph visualization of your org-roam notes.

Cool graph

Open notes in Emacs

(Double) clicking a node will open the corresponding note in Emacs, very cool. You don't need org-protocol for this, it works out of the box!

Note previewing

For when you leave Emacs in a moment of weakness.

Follow your movement in Emacs!

When you open a note in Emacs, org-roam-ui will move to the corresponding node on the graph.

Theme syncing

Your gruvbox is only a M-x orui-sync-theme away (or you can just select them in the settings).

Filters

Filter out all those "temporary" notes you'll sift through someday.

3 D

Literally deepen your understanding of your thoughts (and it looks cool)

Planned features

Graph

In no particular order

• Citation links + customization
• Tag filtering/coloring
• Local graph show Nth neighbor
• Colorization options (by neighbors, centrality, etc)
• Setting profiles

UI in general

• File viewing using AST parsing
• Displaying notes Andy Matushak style
• Discovery options, e.g. "show shortest path between X and Y"

Integrations with other Org-mode packages

md-roam

Use markdown notes interchangeably with Org-mode notes!

Delve

tbd

Supporting org-roam-ui

Chat

We have a small telegram group for discussing org-roam-ui, you can join if you're cool. https://t.me/+sEuL2qi37yw1NzQy

Feedback

For feature suggestions, please make an issue or check out the discussions for major and minor features. For other feedback, please go to the feedback discussion, or open up a new one!

Contribute 💪

The best way to support the continued development of org-roam-ui is to get involved yourself! To get started, simply

git clone https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-ui
yarn
yarn dev

and a development server will be lauched on localhost:3000.

GitHub Community Guidelines apply.

If you are interested in being more closely involved with the project, go here to have an onboarding call with a member of the core team.

We would ❤️ to have you on board!

Donate

If you really really like org-roam-ui, you can make a one-time donation or sponsor one of us monthly!

Sponsors