Do you mind telling me how you use kanban? I tried kanban.el but couldnt get it to update and populate the table, is there any way that emacs can auto-update live the kanban board based on todo states of items?? (e.g. if you hit shift + right for todo it is automatically seen in the todo column, without having to revert the file?)

Sure. I don't like kanban.el much.

After a lot of though, I had a little epiphany. Vanilla org-mode is great as a kanban as long as you don't try to visualize it as a table. One should use an outline instead. org-mode is an extension of outline-mode, so this should not be surprising.

Then everything is simple. Create custom states (I have TODO, PROG, WAIT & DONE). Agenda commands show you summarized views of the kanban. You can customize stuff with a bit of elisp, but org-mode as it is works great.

Note the outline version of a kanban is still 2D, as a table, but strictly more powerful (as you can nest tasks, add text) which would be next to impossible in a table.

>The problem is that most tutorials depict emacs as a bag of keyboard shortcuts. But in reality, there are some simple principles that are quite understandable.

Do you know one that doesn't ?

Unfortunately, I don't. But I plan to write one soon.

Please do write it! What I love about vim is that it is (to me anyway) a DSL for editing a document. The language has verbs "delete, copy, change" and nouns (paragraph, document, line) etc. that you can learn and combine. So once you understand how the language works, you can do a huge amount with it.

I'd love to see a similar thing for emacs, outlining how it is supposed to be used and explored and fits together.