I do have one suggestion: don't try to emulate the feature set of Emacs org mode exactly. While I love org mode, the setup time and effort was many orders of magnitude greater than any other tool I've used before, and I can't say it enabled me to be many orders of magnitude more productive. I would love to have an org mode with sensible defaults (such as indented bullets, project-based agenda view, etc...) with a narrow feature set. For me, the killer features are:
* Mixed notes and TODOs. It was a revelation to be able to just type a TODO into any notes and know that this will magically appear on my master TODO list. But for this to be useful, you really need...
* The agenda view. For those not familiar, this is essentially a consolidated list of todos across all your org files. But I never found the default agenda view that useful, so I again spent lots of time writing one myself. Now I use it many times a day.
* Timers. The way org mode does timers is miles better than any other time tracking software I've ever used.
* Flexible 'projects'. In org mode I have a lot of flexibility in how I treat projects (for me a project is simply a TODO with 1 or more nested TODO). With my agenda view I can quickly see all my projects with two keystrokes.
* Flexible TODO recurrence. Most task managers only let you repeat a TODO every so often, but org has a powerful syntax for defining whatever recurrence pattern you want (i.e. do this task every week on Friday and have it done within 3 days)
* TODOs dates as scheduled or deadlines. It is always surprising to me how other task managers don't recognize this difference. If you schedule yourself to do something on a certain date, it is very different than saying 'you have to get this done by this date'.
* TODO workflows. Most task managers have tepid support for a TODO as a workflow with potential alternate and blocking states (such as waiting on someone before you can do the TODO), but with org mode you can precisely define TODO workflows and do all sorts of cool stuff with them.
* Habits. The way org does habits is simply brilliant.
Keep up the good work!
The "Weekly review" is made for a (slightly tweaked) GTD review. It allows me to review all the finished tasks in one plays, which I archive or refile for future reference (this is to mitigate the downside of mixing TODOs with notes --- you might lose important info when you archive a DONE task). Next block reviews the tasks where I'm waiting on something or someone. I can update their status and close them if whatever I was waiting on has happened. Then there are new tasks from my inbox (org-capture) that I refile and assign priorities/schedules/deadlines too. Then there is the agenda for the next week, so I have a chance to plan my work and schedule more tasks if I have the capacity. Then there is the review of all the NEXT actions. Then there are the SOMEDAY tasks, which I review and occasionally promote to TODOs or NEXT actions.
I'm also tinkering with agenda views that give longer term perspective for project planning. However, I'm already running into the limitations of agenda views.
Most of it is inspired by Bernt Hansen's (cited by the OP) and Sacha Chua's configs, though they are doing even more sophisticated stuff at times.
It's on Package Control and at https://github.com/aziz/PlainTasks
https://github.com/elentok/plaintasks.vim https://atom.io/packages/tasks
It's available through apt-get in Ubuntu and Homebrew on OSX (and probably other package managers, too), and should work anywhere that FUSE does. Doesn't require any special configuration on the server-side except to have SSH enabled (and not be doing anything weird that blocks SFTP, I guess).
What I've been doing instead is using the rsync-ssh plugin https://github.com/davidolrik/sublime-rsync-ssh
I keep a local copy of the repo, which allows me to work even without access to the cloud dev environment and makes searching orders of magnitude quicker, but still saves changes to the remote environment whenever I save a file in Sublime.
It's not perfect, but works well enough for my current workflow, so thought I'd share.
Oh, and tables. Having what is basically a spreadsheet that I can manipulate without ever touching my trackpad is a serious win.
Sadly, I doubt these features will ever be available outside of emacs. Org-mode probably deserves it's own app.
https://github.com/melling/ComputerLanguages
https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes
However, when I want to make big changes, I work locally. Ideally, I'd be warned if I forget to update my local repo when I try to edit.
It's a sort of variation on the Turing Tarpit: it's probably technically possible to implement Org-mode in Eclipse or Vim, but it's not easy. Not easy in both from the sense of software architecture and in the sense of the community. People live in Emacs for Mail and NNTP and a Shell and calendars and calculators and do so because Emacs was designed to be easy to extend and the community did. That community has people who have been married to Emacs for ten, twenty, thirty years. That's the kind of relationship that can sustain a decade+ development effort.
