7 The Templating System

Rather than creating blank files on org-roam-insert and org-roam-find-file, it may be desirable to prefill the file with templated content. This may include:

• Time of creation
• File it was created from
• Clipboard content
• Any other data you may want to input manually

This requires a complex template insertion system. Fortunately, Org ships with a powerful one: org-capture (see (org)capture). However, org-capture was not designed for such use. Org-roam abuses org-capture, extending its syntax and capabilities. To first understand how org-roam’s templating system works, it may be useful to look into basic usage of org-capture.

For these reasons, Org-roam capture templates are not compatible with regular org-capture. Hence, Org-roam’s templates can be customized by instead modifying the variable org-roam-capture-templates. Just like org-capture-templates, org-roam-capture-templates can contain multiple templates. If org-roam-capture-templates only contains one template, there will be no prompt for template selection.