5.1 Titles

To easily find a note, a title needs to be prescribed to a note. A note can have many titles: this allows a note to be referred to by different names, which is especially useful for topics or concepts with acronyms. For example, for a note like “World War 2”, it may be desirable to also refer to it using the acronym “WWII”.

Org-roam calls ‘org-roam--extract-titles’ to extract titles. It uses the variable ‘org-roam-title-sources’, to control how the titles are extracted. The title extraction methods supported are:

1. ‘'title’: This extracts the title using the file ‘#+title’ property
2. ‘'headline’: This extracts the title from the first headline in the Org file
3. ‘'alias’: This extracts a list of titles using the ‘#+roam_alias’ property. The aliases are space-delimited, and can be multi-worded using quotes

Take for example the following org file:

#+title: World War 2
#+roam_alias: "WWII" "World War II"

* Headline

One can freely control which extraction methods to use by customizing ‘org-roam-title-sources’: see the doc-string for the variable for more information. If all methods of title extraction return no results, the file-name is used in place of the titles for completions.

If you wish to add your own title extraction method, you may push a symbol ‘'foo’ into ‘org-roam-title-sources’, and define a ‘org-roam--extract-titles-foo’ which accepts no arguments. See ‘org-roam--extract-titles-title’ for an example.