Some capabilities of org-mode

I'm never going to be able to describe to you what actually using org-mode is like, because it's one of those situations where there is an extremely, mind-bogglingly powerful tool for enthusiasts and professionals, and a cheap toy imitation that most casual people will end up using that imitates the most superficial aspects of the real thing, but because they don't have enough experience to know any different, the casual users won't be able to understand what the difference between the cheap toy and the real thing is.

However, here are a few things org can do that I find extremely useful:

• use an incredibly powerful and flexible hyperlinking system with fuzzy completion for anything that's in my hypertext knowledge system, and which can be extended with custom link styles (such as the wikipedia fuzzy article link I use a lot for this site).
• represent all of my knowledge in a single gigantic database which represents all my work as trees of text nodes (identified by a globally unique ID) where arbitrary metadata – including todo, completion, and scheduling information – and tags can be attached to any node, which I can structurally edit and rearrange, and narrow according to that metadata.
• I can the fly around that entire database without having to worry about individual files, file names, or directory structures using a powerful view that lets me see items I need to do, find headings by keywords, do full text search and jump to or edit results, and do queries on node metadata and tags.
• I can also link between any node and any other node, no matter in what file or how deep in the hierarchy they are, with fuzzy completion, or store links to any location (even if it doesn't have a heading or anything) and insert them later.
• I can also open a new note from anywhere using a template I can specify, which will be automatically added at any point in any of the trees in my hypertext knowledge graph according to the template's definition
• Nodes can be easily relocated without copy and paste or manual navigation at any time
• All with integration in my editor so that I can write custom commands (such as one that will sort headings by their tags, where tag lists are interpreted hierarchically)
• And with an extremely powerful build system for exporting to other formats, such as HTML (which you see with this blog), with advanced export settings on a per-document basis.
• Not to mention extremely rich and flexible markup.
• Turn literally any node anywhere in my hypertext external brain into a todo item, with occurrence dates and deadlines (which can be recurring), clocking time in and out, sub-tasks that get totalled up till the whole task is complete, an arbitrary state machine of todo states if you want, and all the usual tree and metadata and tag capabilities – and those todos will be collected in a central location