Have a look at the approach taken by the logos.el package. There’s a section in the manual called Leverage logos-focus-mode-hook.

The idea there is that when you enable the logos-focus-mode, you’ll often want to change some other minor modes and variables too. But when you disable logos-focus-mode, you’ll want those other minor modes to revert to their previous value. The Logos package provides a few convenience functions to remember the previous values, and they are automatically restored when logos-focus-mode is turned off.

Perhaps the code for that could be made generic, instead of being coupled to the logos-focus-mode?

I keep a journal using org-roam-dailies. My headlines there include “Notes created” and “Notes updated”. I manually create links there as I go along; it’s no hardship to do that a dozen times a day, so I haven’t yet automated it.

The org-roam-timestamps package might be worth a look. It adds created/modified timestamp properties to org-roam nodes, and automatically updates these when saving the node.

An interesting feature is that it can optionally keep a sequence of modification timestamps, not just the last-modified timestamp.

It doesn’t actually change the SQLite schema though. All it does is update the properties in the Org file. (Org-roam considers the files to be canonical; the DB is really just a disposable index for speedy lookups.) The node table already has a properties column, so the created/modified timestamps end up buried in this.

The org-roam-timestamps package is a bit lacking in features, I’d say. All it does is save and update the timestamp properties for each Org-roam node. It doesn’t provide any useful query functions. I’ve had this package installed for ages, but I don’t really do anything with it. For now, it’s just collecting timestamps for the sake of posterity.

I have a vague idea to write some query functions, such as “what nodes did I create/modify on the same day as the current node?”. The results could populate a section in the Org-roam buffer (after the backlinks), or an Org dynamic block.

For a complete list, see the documentation of the marginalia--symbol-class function.

Aren’t those XDA profile keycaps?

I love how “ESC” and “CTRL” are quoted.