Even custom hyperlinks and text notes that refer to chunks inside PDFs are easy to do.

I've had many well-intentioned but ultimately abortive attempts to get on board with Emacs.

So, are images 'possible' or 'trivial'? Not trolling, and I do note that you say it's not part of your workflow.

On the other hand: no, Emacs is not a WYSIWYG word processor. The need to support terminal as a display backend weights heavily on the pace of GUI improvements. That's because all interface elements need to be renderable on all backends (not strictly true, but the prejudice against GUI-only elements is significant). So if you hope to be able to easily and conveniently display something like this: https://klibert.pl/statics/vw-doc-view.png then Emacs is empathically not the best tool for the job.

so (out of the box) in org mode if you type [[./file/path/to.png]] it will turn into a link, if you hit Ctrl-c-x-v it will toggle between showing images as a link (which will open in a new emacs buffer) and just showing the images inline.

ALSO you can just drag an image file onto an emacs window and it will display it in a new buffer.

however getting it so that A) images are displayed automatically when you finish typing the [[path]] and/or B) dragging an image into emacs will result in a new link in orgmode... that's probably possible

This is the package you're looking for. Just drag and drop images into the org mode buffer and you're done. I've been using it for years to take lecture / book notes in org mode where I have to constantly take screenshots and embed them in my notes.

part A is still annoying though. if you have inline images toggled and type in a new image it still turns into a link instead of an inline image.

Thank you Richard

Why?

vim would not be what it is, without emacs to rage against.

Emacs is emacs because its extensible, between vim, neovim and vim9, im starting to think people might enjoy the extensibility seeing as that brings vim up to 3 scripting languages to write things in.

vim has become what it purported to hate

Yea, you will get a lot of Emacs and Emacs with Org mode answers here. To be fair they not wrong :) As a complete emacs newb, start with something like "doom emacs" ! It's brilliant for beginners.

>Emacs is a graphical application

Too few ppl know this.

Including me until now. I will examine this emacs of which you speak. No promises but I can at least attempt to run it.

Goodluck :)

Get used to the basic workflow for a little while and forgive the monospace-ness while you evaluate the workflow. I like taking notes in Gollum wikis, the wiki format used by GitLab and Github. The project management features enabled by default in Doom will kick in for that. Decide how you feel about those.

If you like the workflow, take a look at org-modern and take a few minutes to work out the proportions for variable pitch fonts. Then you can have Org text render in a nice, proportional font that you like and use monospace only for the embedded source code (including shell languages) blocks.

As an alternative to the using git repos to store notes collected into projects, take a look at Org Roam v2 for keeping a topic-based knowledgebase that you can work with without thinking much about the filesystem, and which offers mindmapping features.

That stuff works great for me, has required zero substantial elisp knowledge to get working, and has been natural for me to ease into. I hope you find a workflow you like!

Direct embedding binary data in the Org files would be cool for emailing Org files around, though. It looks like Org does support this kind of embedding on export, if you don't mind exporting to other formats when you send documents around.