* nroam

nroam is a supplementary package for [[https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam][org-roam]] that replaces the backlink side buffer of Org-roam.  Instead, it displays org-roam backlinks at the end of org-roam buffers.

* Rationale

One of the ideas behing nroam is to remove the friction and effort it takes to consult backlinks. I consider backlinks to be a very central piece of information about a note. Backlinks can even be the most important content of a note, for instance when using page links as tags.

It is easy to miss backlinks when they are not always visible with the main content of a note. The side buffer will not always be open, and even if it is, the information it contains is visually far away from the note you're looking at.

By making them an integral part of the org buffer, backlinks also become more powerful. You could for instance make a sparse tree—see =org-sparse-tree= — to filter the contents of a note and its backlinks at the same time.

* Setup

To setup nroam for all =org-mode= buffer, evaluate the following:

#+begin_src elisp
(add-hook 'org-mode-hook #'nroam-mode)
#+end_src

* Warning

This package is in its infancy. Be careful when using it as it modifies your =org-mode= buffers—it should not modify your files though. Backup your data often.

* Performance

At the moment no caching is done when crawling source files for backlinks so there could be performance issues with very large number of org files as a lot of buffers could have to be open to crawl backlink content.