Weirdly I started playing with Emacs + org-mode recently (never been an Emacs user before!) and I'm seriously considering making it my exclusive "second brain".
Something about org-mode, org-babel, org-jupyter, org-agenda and org-roam that just clicks with me.
I mention this because I, too, fell in love with org-mode and magit, and for a while I kept using Emacs only for those tools. Org quickly became a cornerstone of my workflow and made it easy to separate notes and tasks for different clients. I think Obsidian leaves maybe a bit much up to our imagination, but that's part of the beauty of it, imo
Currently sticking Obsidian (because it's discoverable, fast and extensible) and Neovim (only because Emacs is too antiquated)
I use emacs-mac with spacemacs which works pretty well out of the box. What I try to do, to not go into the "hacking Emacs" rabbit hole, is to really avoid tweaking it unless something is really interfering with my workflow.
Exactly. Ironically, Emacs is also the place where transition from tourist to resident is the smoothest. You can stray writing and evaluating Elisp practically anywhere. (Almost) Everything is programmable via Elisp, everything is documented in excruciating detail, learning about any system attribute is two keychords away, there are debugging and profiling tools built in, and source code for very built in thing is available. If the target is to make average Joe into a programmer with least effort, things don't get much better than this.
My advice for those seeking to get into Emacs: start from scratch. Learn how to split your custom.el from your init.el, and make sure you're using git to manage those files. Then start slowly and install org-mode from source and go from there:
8 │ ;; Save customizations in a different file. Prevents this file being
9 │ ;; modified by Emacs.
10 │ ;;; Code:
11 │ (setq custom-file (expand-file-name "custom.el" user-emacs-directory))
12 │ (when (file-exists-p custom-file)
13 │ (load custom-file))
14 │
15 │ ;; Before anything else, orgmode:
16 │ (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.orgsrc/org-9.4/lisp")
17 │ (require 'org-loaddefs)
18 │
19 │ ;; First off, we need MELPA and the org-mode repo:
20 │ (require 'package)
21 │ (add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/") t)
22 │ (add-to-list 'package-archives '("org" . "https://orgmode.org/elpa/") t)
23 │ (package-initialize) 40 │ ;; Taken from https://karl-voit.at/2017/02/11/my-system-is-foobar/
53 │ ;; Check if system is GNU/Linux
54 │ (defun my-system-type-is-gnu ()
55 │ "Return non-nil if system is GNU/Linux-based."
56 │ (string-equal system-type "gnu/linux")
57 │ )
59 │ ;; make Linux a bit more mac-like
60 │ (when (my-system-type-is-gnu)
61 │ (global-set-key (kbd "s-/") 'comment-or-uncomment-region-or-line)
62 │ (global-set-key (kbd "s-<backspace>") '(lambda () (interactive) (kill-line 0)))
64 │ )
362 │ (defun newer-than-7-days(file)
363 │ "Return list of files newer than 7 days old in directory FILE."
364 │ (> 7
365 │ (/(float-time(time-subtract
366 │ (current-time)
367 │ (nth 5 (file-attributes file))))
368 │ 86400)))
407 │ (setq org-agenda-files
408 │ (seq-filter #'newer-than-7-days
409 │ (directory-files-recursively "~/Org/Journal" "\\.org$")))