[iBelieve]

I'm curious, are you (or anyone else using Org Mode) using a single org file for your entire personal wiki, or one file per major topic? In the past, I've used Markdown files with one file per language/topic for my personal developer wiki, but am looking at moving it to Org Mode now. One file for everything (developer knowledge + other subjects) seems nice, but it seems like trying to manage and navigate around a single large file would get messy.

[danShumway]

I use separate files for separate topics. Org mode is pretty good at linking between files. I've even done coding projects where a TODO list links to lines of code inside of a source file (by grep, not by line number, otherwise they'd go outdated every time I committed).

Getting into Org-mode, I would occasionally run into people who would say, "there's one right way to do this. You should be using Org-agenda view for all of your TODOs, you should be setting up tags with this specific system..." Over time, I have learned to ignore those people.

The main benefit of Org-mode is that it is really, really, stinking flexible. You should use whatever system you're most comfortable with (probably whatever you were using before with Markdown) and then slowly adapt features like auto-archiving TODOs, time-tracking, tags, Org-capture, as you need them.

You should look into them, because sometimes you see something cool like Org-capture and you're like, "woah, I could just hit one keypress, type in a sentence, and it'll get auto-filed for me based on the content." But let that "coolness" factor be the thing that guides you. Org-mode is really big and really adaptable, so if you try to grab everything in one go, you'll end up turning your notes into a chore again.

I started using Org-mode specifically because I hated having to adapt a very personal notetaking style to more rigid commercial apps. And my notetaking style evolves based on what I'm going through in life anyway. Org-mode allows it to be more rigid or more flexible based on life circumstances.

[TomDavey]

A single Org file holds my wiki. Yes, it's big, but Org's features make it easily manageable.

Org has fine hyperlinking, and equally fine searching -- including searches on headline tags and properties -- using regexps if desired. Underneath is the logical outline structure -- just like a website -- and the hierarchical inheritance of tags and properties.

Plus -- here's where Org is superior to a Web-based wiki IMO -- it's so easily refactored. When I started I had only a few top-level entries. Over time, I have accumulated hundreds of headlines and their accompanying body text. Multi-level structure emerged naturally, and continues to evolve.

Here are my top-level categories today:

1. Arts and Entertainment 2. Diet and Health 3. Household 4. Restaurant and Bars 5. Petronius.me (my household LAN) 6. Subscriptions 7. People and Me 8. Travel 9. Commonplace Book (quotes, links, and reading I've saved)

Org makes it easy to move things around and re-organize as needed: just cut a subtree and paste it to a new location in the hierarchy.

Org's linking make cross-references a cinch. Who was that person I met on this trip? Oh, here's a link to their personal entry in "People and Me". And that entry will link back to the trip in "Travel."

A headline's unique ID property guarantees that a link will never break, no matter how frequently or drastically you move things around.

[nanomonkey]

I use multiple files, one per topic all in one folder. There is a file called main.org that contains the following embedded code, which creates an index of all of my org files

  * Org-files
  #+BEGIN_SRC sh
      for file in $(ls *.org)
      do 
      echo "[[~/org/$file][$file]]"
      done
  #+END_SRC

[ocharles]

That's a clever use of org-babel!