I don't currently use any of the big programming text editors (no emacs) so am pretty much starting from scratch.
Is org-mode great enough to invest in the learning curve over something like this, or over microsoft one note?
Most of my work is in windows using excel/word/outlook + SAS, oracle SQL, and R (using enterprise guide, toad, and rstudio resp.).
Choosing one note from the beginning is agreeing technical debt is an awesome thing:
- you're stuck with Windows (or whatever mac version they did)
- no way to properly version control it (proprietary format and not just text)
- good luck to migrate somewhere else (I already experienced it with a colleague that left the company and had his entire knowledge base in there ...)
- you got to be happy with the direction Microsoft is taking it.
> Is org-mode great enough to invest in the learning curve over something like this
I don't know about this tool but org mode is as open as it can be and it's been here since years, text based. The time investment is minimal if you just want to use it, it's just all the features around that can take time. I wrote up a tutorial on getting started with org mode if you want to touch the surface of it (https://mickael.kerjean.me/2017/03/20/emacs-tutorial-series-...)
> Most of my work is in ..... R
You can literally put R code snippet in your org document and execute it straight from there but that's just one of the many features org mode has to offer
Quick added question (And apologies if addressed there already) any thoughts on alternate editors to emacs that also work with org-mod if I'm not invested in emacs already?
I've been doing some searching and see suggestions for spacemacs as a more intuitive editor to roll it into. (space key instead of ctrl, mnemonics used in commands)
emacs is the roll roice when it comes to org documents but out of it is perfectly fine, it's like editing markdown documents. I created a web version of orgmode that has quite a few of the goodies from the original orgmode: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/nuage/wiki/Org-Mode
> I've been doing some searching and see suggestions for spacemacs as a more intuitive editor to roll it into.
spaceemacs is emacs + some stuff. It's like choosing ubuntu over arch linux, the only difference is the flavoring. Personally I'm a purist so I only go with the original version. The link I sent you is actually part of a serie I wrote on emacs that start here: https://mickael.kerjean.me/2017/03/18/emacs-tutorial-series-...
That's not a real problem, you can export onenote to many other doc formats. https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/22679/beginner-save-your-one...
Oh it's a real problem alright.
Having used many notes apps & formats over the years, I've been burned by this notion too many times to ever fall for it again. Exporting is only a practical means of migrating sizeable note collections if the export and subsequent import into another system can be done with high fidelity for both content and metadata. This is extremely rare. In practice, the exported version nearly always requires an amount of reorganisation work that's impractical if you have years' worth of notes.
I'll never again use notes software that uses an opaque storage format. In a way I regret this, as it precludes Onenote, Evernote etc, which do have their advantages (no note app I've tried has ever had as nice a basic canvas as Onenote, for example). But longevity and cross-platform availability are the keys for me.
I would have love to put my colleague note on our internal slack, the html export was the closest thing I could use but in practise the generate code is so crapy that it's wasn't possible without spending a lot of time cleaning up the mess and nobody were able to properly find something in his many years worth of internal knowledge base.
But as an example of what it can do (with a little customization), I use org mode for writing fiction. I give each scene a header kind of like a film script slug line. They automatically become foldable, so I can collapse them and just read the headers as an outline. Scenes can be rearranged at will. I can also work backwards from the headers, starting with an outline then filling in the scenes. I can also throw in todo list items wherever I want, on their own or interspersed with the text as reminders for things I want to go back to and edit. Then I have the exporter strips out all the org mode formatting, headers, etc and spit out the text in double spaced manuscript format.
It's the best writing tool I've ever used, with the possible exception of Scrivener.
It will help you with the organization using Org mode. But as you use it more, you might find yourself doing many more things more efficiently in Emacs.
Emacs is not something like Notepad where you go through all the settings and be rest assured that you know everything about the tool. Emacs is so extensible that if someone claims to know it 100%, they are naive. The beauty is that you learn to use the stuff that only you need, and learn more things as they come.
I am telling the above because you might get overwhelmed looking at Org mode feature set. But you don't have to know everything in that.. just learn and srart using what you need right now.
Emacs Speaks Statistics is a project I want to get into but have heard great things about that might interest you, it has support for R, Stata, SAS, etc.
Emacs is also great for email (I use notmuch). I also thought that Spacemacs or Doom were great ways to get into Emacs. Once you get into Emacs you won't be satisfied with most other things. Org-mode is the only platform that can do anything I want, and things I didn't even know I wanted. If you like tinkering and have free time (a spare weekend here and there), configuring Emacs becomes a hobby that is quite captivating and rewards you with a powerful tool for productivity, education, or work.
The learning curve is not really that big - you just have to accept you're going to learn using a new power tool, and be actually willing to spend more than 5 minutes on it, and occasionally open a manual or a tutorial. If you have couple of hours to spare, I recommend getting Emacs and playing a bit with Org mode. This will be enough for you to get a feel of whether you may like it or not.
(However, if most of your organization is related to your work on MS suite, I think you might be better off with One Note anyway, because of the deep integration of Microsoft tools.)