org-roam is an org-mode-based note taking system modelled after Roam, and inspired by the Zettelkasten system. However, it is flexible enough to implement your own system. By default it operates with one note per file, but since the v2 rewrite, you can also assign IDs to headers and thus create new nodes.

org-roam’s main purpose is to maintan an index (in sqlite) of all of your notes to efficiently find notes as well as backlinks.

We could store all notes in a single file and implement backlinks using org-ql instead of using org-roam, but we don’t, primarily for the following two reasons:

1. all existing note integrations for citar either assumes “one file per note”, or uses org-roam. We could implement our own that works with headings instead, but we really don’t want to.
2. putting all notes in a single org file looks surprisingly cluttered and isn’t as useful as we initially thought