I have lately been looking into a plain-text solution to most of my needs for which I currently use multiple apps. For this purpose, I am teaching myself org-mode on emacs for calendaring, to-do lists, writing/exporting, emails, agenda and time tracking. I was wondering if anyone else is using something similar?
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I don’t use org-mode but I do use emacs, mostly for writing shell scripts.
Long time Unix user before moving to Macs.
As much as I tried to like emacs under MacOS, I just couldn’t get it to stick.
I switched to Sublime Text years ago and never looked back. Super fast. Low resources. Handles super large files. And expendable via python.
What editor did you use with Unix?
Emacs. But for some reason I didn’t feel at home with it on MacOS.
I still use it via terminal or SSHing into my Mac Mini server but for everyday use it is Sublime Text.
Now that I think of it, I spent a lot of time trying to learn how to automate emacs. Lisp didn’t click with me. I felt at home with the way Sublime uses python for automation. Plus I found it straight forward to customize the colors etc.
I used to use EMACS quite a bit on Linux, and still occasionally in the shell, but on macOS I mainly use Textmate. The ability to have multiple cursors is fantastic. (Also available in sublime, BBEdit, etc.)
I’m sure once the fingers are trained, one can be productive in org-mode (to its credit, it has been around forever), but it’s a lot to remember. I think for these types of tasks, a GUI with the occasional shortcut suits me better. Or a bullet journal 
I’ve been an Emacs user since the late 80’s on Unix. Moved to a Windows environment to an editor called Epsilon since Emacs didn’t quite port well. Have been back on Emacs for many years and it is my go-to editor for coding. Others code in an IDE of some sort, but for me, the IDE is just the debugger for the code - I’m way more productive with Emacs and the environment I’ve set up in it (same environment for Mac and Linux on the various machines I use).
I used to use org-mode years ago, but Emacs isn’t portable and needed a system that was - Day Timer, Palm, BlackBerry, Todoist was the progression. For me, the access to calendar, todo-list etc must be anywhere.
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It appears that either I have almost travelled back in time or just randomly discovered a prized possession from the past. I am starting to get the hang of it now and beginning to see the benefits of using org-mode. I have now moved my agenda and to-do lists completely to Emacs. Apart from that, I am also formatting most of my documents in it and comfortably exporting it in HTML5 and Latex whilst evaluating chunks of R and python, all in the same file. I find it mind-boggling how powerful and versatile this piece of free software still is, to be honest.
For anyone interested, please go through this YouTube video that summaries some of the basic use-case.
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FYI there’s a freemium iOS app called Beorg that you might be interested in - app is free but there are $2-$3 IAPs for templates and Box.com sync (iCloud, Dropbox and WebDAV sync is free, I believe):
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Thank you very much @bowline for the suggestion. I have been experimenting with MobileOrg on my iPhone but found it to be frustratingly unreliable and obtuse. I am definitely going to try beorg this weekend.
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I’ve dabbled on and off with Emacs. The setup and maintenance and general overhead is quite high. In terms of Org Mode; my main reason for using it, it has simply been surpassed by modern apps and technology. Emac’s major drawback, apart from overhead, is its isolation from everything else. It also suffers from not being mobile. Craft, Things and Calendar fully do what Org mode does. They also do it with less overhead, greater flexibility and without a zillion dependencies that break with every OS upgrade or developer patch.
Recent MPU guest Matt Gemmell is using Emacs:
(haven’t read this article myself yet)
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We’ll see if he’s still using it in a year. The initial joy of emacs is great. It’s when you want to get work done and something breaks that takes 1+days to fix, that the joy leaves.
I’ve used EMACS since the 1970’s. Because of it’s bulk I went with a variant called Epsilon in the late 80’s. I had to stop for a year when they were slow to come up with a 64-bit version, and while I still have it I find that I use BBEdit now. Frankly, Epsilon has more useful functionality for programming, but it has never felt right in MacOS, probably because it runs under XQuartz.
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vi users used to run the joke that Emacs is an Operating System, sadly lacking a usable text editor. If we follow that reasoning, as any other Operating System, Emacs is pretty stable if you don’t mess with the configuration. And this is the issue with Emacs: threading the productivity line between the endless rabbit hole of configuratoin and not being able to do work because the editor doesn’t work is complicated for the tinkerers.
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Been using emacs since the early 90’s as I needed something that would work on various *nix variants as well as Macs. Several years ago I moved all my work stuff into Org mode, keeping it simple with just 3 files, and use Beorg on my iPad for mobile access. My personal notes are in Obsidian for mobile & I use emacs obsidian mode on my Mac for editing those notes. There’s also a wonderful markdown mode that I use for writing & editing work related documentation.
I have a pretty minimal configuration and it’s been incredibly stable on every OS I use it on.
I found just moving from Sonoma to Sequoia broke my working emacs config and it took a day to get back up and running.
That’s unfortunate. I hope it was a fairly simple fix when you were able to narrow down the cause of the problem.
“It took a day to get back up and running”. A fairly simple Emacs fix, indeed.