I've heard this before. Quite a few times now in fact.
I've been urged to make a demo video for Youtube showing how I work in one.
I had a very brief look at org-mode. From this I concluded that it is not even remotely comparable. Big disclaimer: I don't really know it, or use it, or understand it. It looks to me as if it is the beginning of the germ of something that could with a decade's work become an outliner.
Let me give 2 trivial examples.
From the structural point of view, I need a tool that enables me to edit text in 3D. I need it to track at least 5-10 level hierarchies and let me view only of those levels and above, automatically hiding all text below that level. It needs to be trivial to promote or demote text: this is a single-key operation. It needs to store the hierarchy info as metadata, not in the text itself and when text is promoted or demoted it automatically updates the metadata.
It needs to offer tools for very quickly, with a keystroke, move views. So I'm down at level 8 working on a complex multi-step procedure, say. All higher levels are invisible off the top and bottom of the screen. With a few keystrokes I can zoom out and see the overall structure of top-level chapters, find the comparable section I was working on 200 pages away, move there, zoom in, open up more hidden levels, zoom in more, until I find the paragraph I wanted, not by location and not by keywords but by structural location in the document, copy some text, zoom back out, go back to where I was, zoom back in, paste the text and have it adopt the hierarchical position of the destination not the source.
This is all in one pane in a single big document; if "leaf nodes" are sub documents or separate files it's useless to me. Then I must do the mental work of tracking what is where when that's the outliner's job.
Then at a formatting level:
It should track all these levels by style and can format them from a stylesheet automatically, so it knows the styles for heading levels 1-8 on its own, independently defined in a separate file, and for body text and other functional styles such as image captions, footnotes, endnotes, etc.
It should automatically generate and update tables of contexts and an index from this.
No manual formatting: formatting is programmatic according to structure.
At the end of 2016 I wrote a ~350 page technical manual in 6 weeks in MS Word 97 this way, running under WINE on Ubuntu 64-bit. Producing the repro-ready print version took an hour or two on the last day: I took a marketing doc from the client, deleted all the actual text in it to make it a style sheet, saved it as a template, and applied that template to my text to make a final document.
Then there were some checks and fixes, sure, but it was a few steps.
Result, 350 pages of text reformatted in the client's fonts and colours, with their logos, headers, footers, etc. In a couple of mouse clicks.
The formatting stuff is very handy but not essential.
It's the adding an additional level of dimension to text, so it has a structure, one that can be manipulated by the program not by the operator editing markup, that matters. If I had to do this with markup it would be so much more work it's not worth doing it.
The points are:
- a powerful logical structure editor for a large body of text
- tools for automatically maintaining and editing that structure by the software, not the user
- tools for quickly, instantly, jumping between different levels of view of that structure as a navigation method
It's not markup, so at any moment you can just leave outline view and you have a plain text file, or a Word doc formatted with styles, so that someone can work with it who doesn't know what an outline is.
It's not markup so when you move stuff around, up or down, or in and out of the tree, the program updates the tree not you, taking a mental task away and automating it.
Org mode, by comparison, seems to me to be... a cute but clunky shopping list applet?
LibreOffice Writer's headings view is... not even that. It's a way of labelling print preview?
Both are useless toys to me.
As a comparison, think of MS-DOS 3 EDLIN compared to Vim 9.1.
Yes, both are text editors. Yes, both have a command mode. Both can let you edit text files and save them. There is a trivial resemblance in the commands: EDLIN
1,5 d
... to delete lines 1 through 5, which surely has some vaguely similar Vim equivalent. I don't speak Vi.
But functionally, the smaller simpler tool is so trivial compared to the grown-up one that you'd insult a user of the pro tool if you expected them to move to the simple one on the basis of their superficial resemblance.
Does that help?