[MINOR] Visually distinguish empty nodes

[meedstrom]

Have you checked whether this feature is not already on the project board?

Yes

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Sometimes when I let a friend explore my graph, I realize many of my nodes are too empty to be of interest. I imagine this kills curiosity after a while. It would be neat if they knew which nodes to click (and consequently - didn't have to click everything).

Describe the solution you'd like Some visual effect on nodes that have less than 5 lines of text (configurable). Maybe shrink the circle to a few pixels radius, or make it a ring instead of a circle.

Describe alternatives you've considered Maybe circle radius could be determined not by count of links, but by... well, size. The amount of words within. But that would run into some extra complexity with org-transclusion once we support that (#105). The boolean approach above seems fine to me.

[thriveth]

I usually solve this by using a tag borrowed from Wikipedia, "Stub", for nodes that are empty or mainly placeholders. I then give them a specific tag color in the ORUI settings, so I know that blue nodes are the more or less empty ones.

There's an overlap here with what I suggested in #199 ...

[tefkah]

Totally missed this, but a great idea! I will be back to working on orui a bit more consistently soon and i'll definitely add this. I really like the ring/hollow circle idea and probably will implement it as such, but due to the way that the graph is implemented I don't have full control over the shape of the nodes (at least not without massively sacrificing performance). But, this does sound like a good excuse to finally take a look at more custom rendering for the nodes, which will allow for other cool things as well.

[meedstrom]

I usually solve this by using a tag borrowed from Wikipedia, "Stub", for nodes that are empty or mainly placeholders. I then give them a specific tag color in the ORUI settings, so I know that blue nodes are the more or less empty ones.

Thank you, that's good idea. All my new notes now get the :stub: tag by default (to be removed after it's fleshed out) and I color them black. I'll include the trick in an "Org-roam Tips" post when ever I publish one.

In my mind, I was reserving color for other semantic purposes, but I'm not using color for any semantic at the moment so it works out for me. But this led me down a new track of thought. We could do just the part of my suggestion that detects <5 lines of content, and assign those nodes to a pseudo-tag that exists only in ORUI, which allows for doing other things such as filtering them out too.

I think (as demonstrated by my filing this issue) that detecting <5 lines is a useful knob for zettelkasten beginners who may not have had the foresight to put in a :stub: tag or the tech proficiency to retroactively put it into hundreds of preexisting notes.

As for rendering different shapes like a ring, that could still allow for interesting things if you get to pick a shape as well as a color everywhere, for example we could give book notes a square shape or even a book symbol and so on. But @ThomasFKJorna if you want to close this issue to prune your todo list I'm fine with it.