My thoughts after using Org Mode for more than two years:
I really like Org Mode, but the only things I really use it for for are taking notes and capture templates. (Capture templates let you define keybindings to capture different kinds of notes and send them to specific destinations in the filesystem.)
Lately, I’ve been thinking that I might be able to do all of that in [neo]vim along with command line tools.
- To-do lists: Taskbook or Taskwarrior
- Notes: write markdown files in Vim (or any text editor), using bash aliases or simple scripts to simulate capture templates.
- Org Mode is great for managing text-based tables, but there is a table plugin for Vim that might work.
- Calendar: something like calcurse or gcalcli
- Export to any format: pandoc
My main frustration with Emacs is that Emacs’ vim emulation (Evil Mode) doesn’t always work consistently across all buffers. It’s also hard for me to keep the configurations in sync. Example: space-b in my Vim closes a buffer, and space-b in my Emacs opens up a list of recent buffers. The two programs have slightly different behavior, and I think it’s harder to switch back and forth than to just pick one.
(Either program is a good choice – I would recommend them over other text editors for anyone whose brain enjoys processing symbols.)