Emacs is written to be a highly flexible text editor, and org-mode is a plug-in it's not designed to be something like Scrivener, which, as far as I can tell, bundles together all of the tools that they think writers need (and in a cool-looking way). There's not much of a GUI to speak of, beyond the toolbar at the top of the screen (and each window). The disadvantages are that the workflow tends to be designed for people who are programmers, and work in emacs. The outlines are exportable to a number of different formats. The advantages are that it's free, and highly customizable (up to a point).
What I like about text-based formats is that it's easy to determine exactly what changes have been made between revisions (hell, if you want to track versions, use a version control system like Mercurial, Git, Subversion, etc.). Aquamacs comes with org-mode, which is a nice text-based format for outlining and text-folding (so you can hide various parts of your outline).
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Aquamacs is an emacs port for OS X that's free and has a nice Mac interface you can use instead of many of the Unix-based keyboard shortcuts. I tend to write outlines using emacs and org-mode, because I do technical research that involves a lot of programming, and as a result, I live in emacs. There a posting in my blog comparing the outlining feature in both programs: Outliner in Scrivener vs Outliner in Circus Ponies Notebook - Structure (Scrivener) vs Content (CPN) Outlinesįrankly I couldn't have written my diploma, nor my PhD thesis, without it. While Scrivener is very useful for structural outlines, Circus Ponies Notebook excels at Content Outlines. This posting on my blog gives a nice overview of its functions, there's also an example linked at the end of the posting. The files in Scrivener contain more than one idea when I write which makes it difficult to shift information. While I love Scrivener, I need an outline that is more detailed, one information per cell. You can also use keywords to make sure you remember your sources, and of course, non-relevant parts can be folded in. I use it for fictional and non-fictional writing, then put my outliner next to Scrivener to write it down (CPN has the advantage of optional checkboxes for each cell, so you always know what you have already used). You can easily integrate media files as well. It uses the notebook metaphor and it has a page type that gives you an outliner. I can highly recommend Circus Ponies Notebook.
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