the thing about org-mode is that it feels strongly designed for being used inside of emacs with the emacs hotkeys etc. If you do most of your stuff in emacs that's fine. But if you like me live in the shell it's not reasonable to go so deep into emacs. I want to awk/sed/grep/vim things. And if you do that with org-mode files it won't be as much fun.
I use Markdown and just start to peek into Asciidoc.
I agree, and I'll probably never be able to shake Emacs because of my reliance on orgmode. I wouldn't leave and write markdown in another editor without many orgmode features. In fact, Emacs markdown-mode has a lot of the same features and is arguably a great markdown environment in its own right. It's annoying.
I agree, I switched from Org-mode mainly because Emacs is not always available. Asciidoc/Asciidoctor is so much superior for plain text editing while still being consistent. Also you don't have to use Ruby implementation if Asciidoctor.js suits your needs.
It really knows the elements as objects. So it can interact with them. E.g. it recognizes dates and creates a calendar like Google Calendar for you. You can also move subtrees in linked lists around, only show certain layers etc. You can turn a list element into a TODO, change it's TODO status, and even log the time you took for a TODO element. But all of that becomes much harder with bash and friends.
Do you know Powershell? It feels similar to me. You interact with objects instead of strings. That's also why string manipulation tools don't feel so great with org mode files. You cannot grab an org mode object as easily as a line or a paragraph with tools optimized for string manipulation.
I would add that its not just that you can interact with different objects in the markup, but that there's a huge collection of operations built into Org-mode on emacs that does interact with them this way. You don't need to write code to interact with the org markdown; you just use the already written org features.
For example, the ability to search a file or set of files and collect responsive org heading items in a separate "Agenda" buffer is hugely empowering for a lot of different uses. Org-mode on emacs has both very broad and very deep functionality.
It's not necessarily easy to learn, but you can ignore the more complicated stuff if you want, just use the very simple basics and remain ignorant of the much deeper functionality that's there for people who want to make use of it. Or, better, start simple and learn more complex bits and pieces as you go; there's an active and friendly org community that helps with that.
Piles and piles of automatic formatting, for one. Working with tables in org-mode is really nice. That an emacs lisp means you can customize various parts to your liking. I used to have a snippet that would assign ids to elements automatically. I can also customize export, etc.
And, of course, like someone mentioned, being able to interact with your document almost like it's a proper data set that you can manipulate programatically.
It can be used and read in any text editor. Org is powerful, but it's more like Word than it is like notepad. It automatically formats tables, automatically copies and makes links internally, automatically indents, highlights code snippets, etc. And that's not even getting into further functions you can build with emacs lisp.
But it is centrally dependent on emacs for that power. Markdown and asciidoc work in anything.
The only non shell tools I use are browsers and Steam, the latter one painfully mostly on Windows.
Otherwise I mostly program, admin or devops around. Bash, git, vim, grep, awk, tmux, ssh are the tools I use most. Nowadays also a quite a lot of Ansible. But don't like it as much.
You know, I spent nearly 10 years really learning all that stuff with the intention to use it the rest of my life. And to this point it seems to work out quite well. So no reason to learn other tools like Emacs, which would take up another few years to learn. Once you have a basic set of tools down it's more important to use it for value production.
actually i use, vi, bash, git, grep, awk, ssh too. but emacs replaced my need for spreadsheets, calendars, todo lists, IDEs, and magit augmented my git experience. i hesitated for years on emacs, but 5 years ago i made the switch. i don't mean your setup is lacking - just open up mine )
I tried, mostly because I really like the idea of git managed sources for all these. But it's hard to integrate both bash life and emacs life. And you can't see the stuff on your phone. So I stopped after a few weeks. Any suggestions for that?
I use Markdown and just start to peek into Asciidoc.