I really recommend everyone to try it.
The power of org mode lies in its simplicity.
No fancy gui, not too many features but allows creating and extending.
When you need to be productive you need a simple tool so you do not spend your time being busy instead of working
I absolutely agree with this. And as reformed vi user and current emacs acolyte, everyone should use emacs for everything always.
But... I really wish someone would spend some time building some first class alternative implementations of org-mode. I say this not because I want to escape emacs (I'll never go!), but because I wish org-mode would replace Markdown. It's a better format. People outside the emacs world just think I'm weird for using it. If Vim/Atom/Sublime/Eclipse/Netbeans/Etc all supported org as a format, then I wouldn't have to use anything else.
"Simplicity"?! <Cough> It took me quite a few hours to learn. :-)
At first, I was a bit frustrated and thought "Because of recommendations, I just spent X hours learning a tool where the GUI applications can be learned in minutes?! Was this a good use of my life?"
Then I realized the usability I had -- and that it was the closest thing I ever got to paper and pencil with a keyboard; I didn't need to think so it was not in the way when I wrote down notes.
Yes, another classic case of "ease of use" vs "ease of learning". It's easy to conflate the terms (and most people usually mean "ease of learning" when they say "ease of use").
I'm with you, though. I wouldn't call it simple, but man is it easy to use.
What the GP was referencing was the old argument of us Emacs users:
"There is a difference with efficiency of easy learning and efficiency when using". It implies that the cost of learning Emacs is small, per year of bliss using it. (Why would you downgrade to something else if you know Emacs?)
I guess, something like this for a musician: "This was a hard piece of music to learn, but it is sure to get me laid many times." :-)
(Sorry about the preconceived opinion about why people learn to play an instrument, it is obviously jealousy since I can't even clap hands to most of my favorite music. :-) )
Learning to play an instrument "to get laid" is a guaranteed way to be mediocre at said instrument :) Practicing for the wrong reasons is pretty much bad practice.
Only joking, I know enough music people to get that a lot of musicians are nerdier than I am.
But the music people I know would still have appreciated that joke, so either drink more coffee or sleep more? :-)
(You could counter with "If those people knows you, then they obviously don't have much of a sense of humour anyway -- which is another proof of the heterogeneity of musicians backgrounds." :-) )
>"Simplicity"?! <Cough> It took me quite a few hours to learn. :-)
For me, 7 years ago, it was literally: "Watch a 45 minute talk on it on Youtube, and I'm good to go"
The learning curve is very shallow. You can do useful stuff with minimal learning. Once you start customizing, though, it takes more effort. Even that, initially, was just reading people's posts on how they customized it and tweaking that.
Definitely not difficult to get into. Just don't do it by reading the manual. All Emacs manuals are written as references, not as manuals.
While I agree with people trying it, I also just want to give the other side. I tried it for a few weeks, and stopped. For some people it is perfect, but I found it didn't integrate well with anything else.
Like much of Emacs, it assumes you want to spend your whole life in org-mode. If that's not compatible with your life (and for me it's not. Sometimes I'm on another computer, sometimes an android device, sometimes in Eclipse), then org-mode will fight you constantly.
The export function is stellar (although I had to hack the OOo support to work on Windows); HTML exports look great (well, after using the right stylesheet).
It's a really great way of bootstrapping/seeding presentations.
