My girlfriend is willing to learn orgmode, she doesn't have programming background, what will be a smooth learning curve for her?

My girlfriend has no computer or even programming background, and the only time she needs to write some programs is to write a little bit statistical analysis code in R. Basically, she just copy-paste from the Internet, and she even struggles to write a for loop. But recently, she saw that I use orgmode, and very interested in the integrated smooth workflow of using orgmode for GTD+note-taking seamlessly. Now I am ready to bring my girlfriend into this hole, but now I have several problems as follows. 1. My girlfriend uses a windows computer, and I have not used a windows computer for six or seven years except to play games, so I don't know how to configure it under windows at all. emacs is known to have a relatively average experience under windows. 2. I am using doom emacs, except for the most basic operations such as `C-bpfnaehk` which are adapted by macOS as global shortcuts, I do not know the native shortcuts of emacs at all. My girlfriend had a slight experience with vim, mainly because I introduced her the vim mode in rstudio, she knows `yiw`, `ci}` stuffs like basic operation, but she usually mainly uses office, vim mode is just rarely used, and not skilled. So if I introduce it to the pit, I'm not sure to introduce her to install the classic vanilla emacs (surely a distribution that uses vanilla keybindings, such as centaur? or the vanilla version of doom?) Do you guys think it's better to let someone who knows a little bit about vim but is not very skilled use vim mode, or let her learn emacs' weird ancient vanilla shortcuts? 3. Finally, a broad context question, do you guys have any suggestions for smoothing out the introductory curve for someone with little computer background (or even little programming background) to use emacs? Thanks for your help and I would be much appreciated it for any help and advice!

Could use Logseq instead of Emacs.

There is no smooth curve. It's curvilinear... We can say that much.

If she already knows a little vi, try to see if doom emacs would run on Windows.. It's something she has seen already, going native emacs will be something completely new and it's neither related to vim nor to any office suite.. And then try to keep it at org-mode for a while.. Don't try to push your (probably more elaborated) emacs config onto her, just help her getting HER org setup usable and have her use it for a while.. That's what she wants to have the most after all and it's already enough to take in at first(with all the emacsy things also on the learning list like moving around, copying, pasting, managing files and so on). I used org-mode for timekeeping at an outsourcing company for quite a while and I pretty much only used a vanilla emacs with just org-mode for that and once that worked nicely after a few months, THEN I started to feel around the ecosystem and see what else it could do for me.. And nowadays, I try pretty hard to not leave emacs for anything :)

This is probably not the answer you want, but why don't you show her Rmarkdown within Rstudio first to see if that is enough for what she wants?

Logseq is more suitable for her.

from my experience (YMMV): Do not give an newbie Doom or Spacemacs, they will try and then never want to use Emacs again. I have not yet found a good solution, but think, that supplying a plain Emacs (with `icomplete-vertical-mode` enabled) is best. Be prepared to help if usage problems arise. A newbie is much more tolerant to "weird" keybindings than experienced users. Newbies seem not tolerant to complex/hidden ui-interactions like you need for VI modes. Do **not** disable menus or scrollbars or the toolbar! Those might look ugly, but for a newbie those are life savers. Show her how to use the menu and tell her, that the menu shows the keybindings. Don't explain too much, she will get overwhelmed. But tell her, that everything is just a command (`M-x`) and it is always possible to abort by `C-g`. --- You could install Emacs into WSL2. This runs rather smooth. Then from within the WSL2 setup, create symbolic links to important directories she is using all the time.

[How to Start With Emacs Org Mode](https://karl-voit.at/2020/01/20/start-using-orgmode/) addresses some parts of your request. I'd recommend default bindings. It's easier to get help, read manuals, ... Modes usually irritate normal users more than non-mode systems.

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OMG someone mentioned *girls*, snigger snigger.

This has been removed, as it is off-topic, not very civil, and frankly kinda creepy.

Yep highly recommend

I have run Emacs on windows for a year or so now. functionally it’s fine (sometimes slower than WSL) and for using org-mode it’s great. Depending on what packages you want to install you may need in install MSYS2 to build them (like pdf-tools). If the windows system is easier for her then installing a windows package manager like [scoop](https://scoop.sh) will make life easy and simple for managing packages. (Emacs can be installed through scoop via ‘scoop install emacs’.). Alternatively WSL2 is functionally a Linux environment inside of windows that allows GUI applications by enabling WSLg. For an intro to Linux it’s fantastic the only difficulty when learning might be with when learning Linux/Emacs with WSL is accessing the Linux file system directly from the windows side is essentially impossible when/if something went wrong in WSL or my Emacs config. For emacs this could be managed by changing the emacs-user-directory relatively easily though as your hard drives can be mounted directly to WSL.

I second this. Maybe look into the book Mastering Emacs (masteringemacs.org) for a great intro to Emacs for the absolute new person, also Rainer Konig did an amazing series on org mode on YouTube.

My path from Zero to Org user in Windows 10 was: 1. Learn Vim (use the tutorial) and apply into my day to day (add to any program who support basic vim keybindings like internet browser, pdf reader, etc). 2. Install Doom by scoop (MSYS2 or Powershell) works fine. 3. Read everyday one chapter of the Emacs info manual (theory) and write a personal summary on an empty document (practice). 4. For your needs the useful chapters to make additional documents are about \*doom-basics\*, \*evil-basics\* and \*org-basics\* which contain the keys commands that works and you try while writing. 5. Bonus, watch in youtube org tutorials and add what you find useful in your \*org-basics\* file. One really easy is the Rainer König's OrgMode playlist . P.D. In the step 3 for personal preference, I use instead the book \*Mastering Emacs\* by Mickey Petersen to make the documents.

she uses rmd. But The main goal of rmd is to provide a Jupyter-like REPL stuff and publish the html or pdf, not to take note with GTD. I take notes with GTD, she’s interested in that workflow.

I might agree with you. I briefly read it’s github documentation. My first impression is that it is a GUI-friendly and less-hackable orgmode.

Wait- You have Emacs _and_ a girlfriend.... This smells exactly like the case of someone asking a Doctor about a condition "for a friend." 😂 /s

You do not need to learn how to program to use Org Mode. You also do not need to adopt a keyboard-driven setup with Emacs. Emacs and Org Mode are suitable for anyone who can type and operate a mouse. I recently bought a course on Udemy, taught by Rainer Kronig. His implementation mostly only uses the plain-text meta tagging syntax to set up Org Mode and its Agenda. [https://www.udemy.com/course/getting-yourself-organized-with-org-mode/](https://www.udemy.com/course/getting-yourself-organized-with-org-mode/) You may also find Rainer Kronig on youtube.

Start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQS06Qjnkcc&list=PLVtKhBrRV\_ZkPnBtt\_TD1Cs9PJlU0IIdE&ab\_channel=RainerK%C3%B6nig

Yes. This is the way.

I am a almost-daily user of Rmd - I can’t understand the upvotes for this suggestion. Anybody who has used Rmd will know that it’s not suitable for anything remotely resembling GTD tasks or notes or capture or sync across devices. The Rstudio IDE is barely usable for anything other than R especially when compared to Emacs or even +lol+ VS Code.

I think R-language-server with Emacs-ESS or Nvim-R are just better than rstudio. High efficiency text manipulation (rstudio’s vim mode is just crap), and decent language feature support. BTW, Emacs-ESS is maintained by some of the core R developers. The gui interface of Rstudio are following matlab style in some sense, which is both ugly and distracting, there are too many redundant UI elements to let me focus on the code. And for any other things besides R, Rstudio is crap, I totally agree with you.