Do you have a TLDR of this often mentioned org mode? I have never used emacs. From what I have seen it’s an append only text file with none of the markdown formatting?
Org mode is crazy powerful but has a steep learning curve, and coupled with being new to emacs it can be quite daunting. While I personally use doom emacs as my daily editor I found org mode didn't suit my way of working.
I recently re-discovered Obsidian and I've been enjoying it a lot. It's very flexible, works in a way that I find intuitive to my brain and it's allowed me to keep a (almost) daily journal, as well as turned into a repository for notes I make about work projects and everything else. I'd recommend checking it out alongside org-mode.
Logseq is a “second brain” but its primary format is a daily journal. This threw me off at first because I like to file knowledge into different topics. But turns out you can just throw random thoughts at it daily in bullet points, hashtag main points, and later see all hashtags in a single view. This encourages you to keep writing on different topics without organizing them first, and still be able to have a coherent view a certain topic later (just click on the hashtag). You can even build queries for bullet points in your bullet points.
Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify uses Logseq. Logseq is essentially like a huge Lisp engine but with a modern Markdown interface.
You can add things like tables, but they are limited like a Word Processor and less like Excel.
You can include blocks of functioning source code like a Jupyter notebook.
You can export all of it to formatted HTML or PDF or whatever you like.
You can write Lisp programs to interact with the structure and collection of your documents. This lets you build entire applications and workflows. One such application will traverse all of your documents, construct a prioritized agenda and schedule any TODO items that it finds.
Vanilla (unmodified) Emacs has an ugly org-mode that looks less inviting and less powerful than Notepad. Do not be fooled by this. A few add-on packages turn it into something powerful and beautiful.
Actually, tables in org mode have function capability like Excel too. Obviously not the full, extensive capabilities of Excel, but they are far more than simply text formatted as a table.
You can think of org-mode as interactive markup language. It has a lot of features for managing TODOs but what I like the most I hiding or displaying sections, exporting directly to latex or html using custom classes with a simple keybinding and so one.
It takes time to get familiar with Emacs. I started on October and was spending one hour a day during two weeks to get familiar with it. You have to take it very slow because there are a lot of keybidings, concepts and functions. It is like learning to play piano. But once you get it it's awesome and it is lots of fun.
This May I started getting serious with elisp, the Emacs scripting language (also Emacs own language, C and elisp), and it's amazing. You can automate everything you want really easily. I wrote some elisp functions that made my life so much useful. I used to have tons of bash shells open over the place. Now I have some key bindings that automate the usual tasks. Some written in bash but others written in elisp or a mix so I have a nice UI and can have easy selection or can add parameters and interact with my documents.
If you have time, are curious and like to hack I totally recommend giving it a try. Also the community is amazing. Getting into Emacs made me discover other funny things like mailing lists, Usenet and even philosophers!
I am not an expert and I will never be but for me it is a lot of fun. Also the community is awesome.
I’d say you’re mostly right. I’ve used org mode a lot in the past. Now I use One Note, which I’m sure would draw a lot of complaints from this group, but it works for me. I think use whatever works best for you, try different things and stick with what you end up liking.