I'm a vim-guy. I've been using vimoutliner (https://github.com/vimoutliner/vimoutliner) for my todo lists, since I put my notes inside my todo lists. With vimoutliner, you can make any line have a checkbox [_], and it understands that a top-level is done only if all of its children are done.

Its true that org mode is useful for organising various stuff, but it can also do other things, literate programming. it also lets you work with multiple programming languages at the same time. I think that is more powerful than even the jupyter notebooks. http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html

Yes, super jealous of org mode. For my literate programming I try to follow the Vim philosophy of delegating to external tools: http://akkartik.name/post/wart-layers. My approach adds some new capabilities, but it's not nearly as nice an experience.

I tried vimoutliner (and some other org-mode clones in vim) shortly after I switched to emacs and learned to use org-mode, and found that these clones weren't anywhere near as powerful as org. As far as I know, there really is no substitute.

I'm somewhat drawn to helpers like this, but what ends up being a pollutant for me is the system within a system paradigm. With emacs I have the same problem. I enjoy the UNIX philosophy where one program should do one thing and interesting things come from composing them. I'd love for similar helpers, as I've called them, to be implemented as cli tools. You would then call them from vim for example. Interactivity would be sacrificed, but I don't value it lot. This probably makes me a purist or some other -ist.

If it comforts you, think of Emacs as a VM, which happens to automatically boot into a text editor.

I just use vim-markdown (which provides basic to-do list features and nice handling of bullets, indent, etc.) and some shell functions. One is `note`, which when passed a title, creates a markdown file in my notes directory with the date and that title and then pops it into vim. The other is `notes`, which uses fzf to provide a fuzzy finder of all the notes in my notes directory, and then opens the selected one.

I used to be a BIG spacemacs guy because I liked org so much, but I found that TaskWarrior does task tracking better, TimeWarrior does time tracking better (especially with the taskwarrior <-> timewarrior hook, it's magic!) and Vim does outlining only slightly worse but benefits from all the other optimizations I have in my vimrc.

Next thing I'm going to add is a shell function that uses pandoc to convert my notes files into HTML on demand.

Not even close. Even org's own reader modes haven't done that.

vimwiki

It's an 80% solution for org mode, but it's the 80% I care about.