I have been emacs adjacent most of my career (I'm 50), but never really took to it until about 6 or 8 years ago. I was never a full-time Linux dev, for one thing. For another, I've spent my career about half in code or whatnot, and the other half in PowerPoint or Word communicating technical things to nontechnical people, and so lacked the long-term immersion I thought was really needed to GET emacs.
What finally drove me to it was Org. I got super tired of proprietary to-do/data managers evolving away from my needs. The last example was the VERY popular OmniFocus, which had a major rev that introduced tons of whitespace and thereby killed the "high data concentration" view that I wanted.
OF was also pretty crap at something else I really wanted, which was the ability to have TODO tagged items in my notes. It could almost do that, but not really. And, of course, Omnifocus files are opaque.
Orgmode is exactly what I wanted. I have a huge corpus of files that are searchable with almost immediate speed (via Deft), and Org itself is awesome at pulling the TODO items out of a notes outline.
I manage a whole bunch of client relationships/implementations, so I have a file for each customer. I can easily scroll back and review the history of a deal/engagement, see what was discussed and what was decided, and also see all the todo items that I noted and did, and when they were done.
The agenda function means I can see a review of all the active TODO items across all the org files super super easily.
The tl;dr is that it's SUPER powerful, and will absolutely reward you spending a couple days figuring out how to make it work for you. There's a bunch of very generous people in /r/emacs and /r/orgmode who will help you, too, if you get stuck. I strongly suggest you give it a try.
I don't edit EVERYTHING in emacs now, but org has me pulled in enough that, unless it's an email or a real document, I'm probably in emacs.
What finally drove me to it was Org. I got super tired of proprietary to-do/data managers evolving away from my needs. The last example was the VERY popular OmniFocus, which had a major rev that introduced tons of whitespace and thereby killed the "high data concentration" view that I wanted.
OF was also pretty crap at something else I really wanted, which was the ability to have TODO tagged items in my notes. It could almost do that, but not really. And, of course, Omnifocus files are opaque.
Orgmode is exactly what I wanted. I have a huge corpus of files that are searchable with almost immediate speed (via Deft), and Org itself is awesome at pulling the TODO items out of a notes outline.
I manage a whole bunch of client relationships/implementations, so I have a file for each customer. I can easily scroll back and review the history of a deal/engagement, see what was discussed and what was decided, and also see all the todo items that I noted and did, and when they were done.
The agenda function means I can see a review of all the active TODO items across all the org files super super easily.
The tl;dr is that it's SUPER powerful, and will absolutely reward you spending a couple days figuring out how to make it work for you. There's a bunch of very generous people in /r/emacs and /r/orgmode who will help you, too, if you get stuck. I strongly suggest you give it a try.
I don't edit EVERYTHING in emacs now, but org has me pulled in enough that, unless it's an email or a real document, I'm probably in emacs.