Emacs Org-mode Review

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Review of Emacs Org-mode powered by the Slant community.

Org-mode is for keeping notes, maintaining to-do lists, planning projects, and authoring documents with a fast and effective plain-text system.

SpecsUpdate

PlatformsLinux / OSX / Windows

APIYes

Collaborativeno

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Pros

Pro
Files are usable anywhere at anytime

Users are not tied to one service provider, program, platform, or database engine.

Pro
Ultimate flexibility

This app's flexibility is based on its minimalist approach, giving the user near-infinite freedom.

Pro
Agenda views

Pro
Absolutely free

Emacs with Org-mode is free as in beer and free as in speech – that is, it costs nothing and it’s totally open source.

Pro
Supports plaintext spreadsheets

Pro
Incredibly extensible

There are many plug-ins for Org-mode, including Org-habits and Org-notify. If Org-mode lacks some piece of functionality, it is very easy to add it.

Pro
There are a lot of extensions, for exporting to html, bootstrap, js-reveal and much more.

Pro
Quickly add rich text

Pro
Efficient features for deadline organization

Pro
Offline support

Pro
Excellent unofficial Android app (orgzly)

Cons

Con
Unintuitive user interface

The key combinations are unintuitive and difficult to remember. This is probably because there are a lot of hidden "modes" depending on where the cursor is. Actions aren't paired with reversing actions like in other todo apps. For example, hitting shift-tab does NOT reverse the effect of hitting tab.

Con
Android app isn't very good

There are several user-created apps for Android, but none seem to offer the same level of functionality as other to-do apps.

Con
By default, a hard-to-read display

The default way of writing an outline or checklist creates a very messy wall of text that's difficult to read with no vertical spacing. You can manually add vertical spacing, but the Org operations don't preserve it. There are pretty-display modes, but you need to remember how to enable them, etc. etc.