When comparing Unclutter vs Emacs Org-mode, the Slant community recommends Unclutter for most people. In the question“What is the best note taking app for Mac?” Unclutter is ranked 17th while Emacs Org-mode is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Unclutter is:
Unclutter lives in the navbar at the top of your screen, and is always accessible. Any files and notes stored in Unclutter can be quickly accessed from anywhere, with just a mouse movement and scrolling down.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Convenient and fast access to files and notes
Unclutter lives in the navbar at the top of your screen, and is always accessible. Any files and notes stored in Unclutter can be quickly accessed from anywhere, with just a mouse movement and scrolling down.
Pro Keep desktop clean(er)
Instead of keeping commonly used files on the desktop, you can tuck them away to the top of the screen. This can unclutter your screen, or create more room for more icons if you like quick access to everything.
Pro Ultimate flexibility
This app's flexibility is based on its minimalist approach, giving the user near-infinite freedom.
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 Files are usable anywhere at anytime
Users are not tied to one service provider, program, platform, or database engine.
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 Agenda views
Pro Excellent unofficial Android app (orgzly)
Pro Offline support
Pro Efficient features for deadline organization
Pro Supports plaintext spreadsheets
Pro There are a lot of extensions, for exporting to html, bootstrap, js-reveal and much more
Pro Quickly add rich text
Cons
Con Can't keep visor open when typing in other applications
The unclutter visor will not stay open when working/typing in other apps. Sometimes it is desirable to use the visor to re-type things, it's not possible outside of copying and pasting, or opening and re-closing the visor.
Con $10 seems a bit much for what it does
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 Not really cross platform
Although it is possible to get a lot of it working, no all in one, sync included, out of the box solution is available for mobile devices.
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.