Import from Roam's JSON export

[ghost]

RoamResearch provides a way to export your entire database as JSON. This feature would allow importing that data into org-roam. This would enable people with existing personal Roam DBs to fully switch to org-roam.

[jethrokuan]

You may choose to export to markdown instead, here's a gist that I tried that seems to work, using pandoc and some unix utilities:

https://gist.github.com/jethrokuan/370e14b6cd9b7725b815bbdd0cb923fe

[ghost]

Thanks!

Some things I noticed:

1. (necessary) There's an issue with the sed expression: https://gist.github.com/jethrokuan/370e14b6cd9b7725b815bbdd0cb923fe#gistcomment-3249735
2. (annoyance) No page titles are generated.
3. (nitpick) The generated file names don't get formatted the same way as native org-roam files.

2 and 3 work together for org-roam-insert to still give nice completions, so it's really just an issue of consistency with other org-roam files.

[AyeGill]

There's another issue with aliased internal links, like [foo]([[My Foo Page]]).
sed can probably handle this more easily, but I wrote a python script to do it:

https://gist.github.com/AyeGill/72744b0e54ebf898268beb8c992cabd5

Another thing that doesn't work is "nested links" - in Roam, you can have a link as part of a page title, and this "just works" when linking to that page.
But that's probably hard to fix.

[jethrokuan]

Probably easiest to write elisp to do this, sed was just a quick experiment. I'll do it if there's enough demand for it.

[nightscape]

Hey @jethrokuan, if you do, would you mind doing a screencast of you coding it?
Like a pair-programming session with an invisible buddy 😉
Doesn't need to be super-detailed and with a lot of overhead, just for people to get into the project and your thinking.

[jethrokuan]

Hey @jethrokuan, if you do, would you mind doing a screencast of you coding it?

Sure, I don't really mind. It's a bit separate from this project though, so might not be so relevant.

[giansegato]

I second this request. I'd love to migrate from Roam Research, but doing manually is a very tough endeavour. It'd improve the adoption of Org Roam too.

[fabioberger]

I wrote a tool that converts Roam Research exports into Org-roam compatible markdown: https://github.com/fabioberger/roam-migration