neorg

Neorg is a plugin for Neovim, a keyboard-driven text editor popular with programmers. The plugin turns Neovim into a full personal organization system: note-taking, task and project management, time tracking, slideshows, and document writing all live inside the same tool. If you are not already a Neovim user, Neorg is not something you would install on its own.

Everything in Neorg is built around a single custom file format called .norg. The idea is that you learn one format once and then every feature in Neorg speaks that same language. Notes, tasks, and documents all live in .norg files, so they can reference each other and stay consistent. The format is designed to be readable as plain text even outside of Neovim.

Installation is described in the README as slightly more complex than average. You need Neovim version 0.10 or newer, plus a Lua package manager called luarocks on your system. The README covers three plugin managers: rocks.nvim (the recommended path), lazy.nvim, and the now-unmaintained packer.nvim. A kickstart configuration is also available for people who do not have an existing Neovim setup and want to get going without prior configuration knowledge.

The project describes itself as stable but young, and warns that breaking changes do appear between versions. Version 9.0.0, for example, introduced changes that affected existing workflows. The README links a blog post explaining what changed, and suggests pinning to a specific version and only updating when you are ready to deal with any adjustments.

Neorg is licensed under GPL v3 and has an active community on both Discord and Zulip. The project is written in Lua, which is the standard language for Neovim plugins. A video tutorial series on YouTube and a wiki are available for people who want to go deeper after installation.