I agree with you that emacs org-mode is definitely not very graphical ! Regarding non-hierarchical information organization however, keep in mind that this art

I agree with you that emacs org-mode is definitely not very graphical ! Regarding non-hierarchical information organization however, keep in mind that this article was only a very quick intro to the most basic possibilities of org-mode. Org-mode actually provides a pretty powerful set of non-hierarchical structuring functionalities by using tags. Within org-mode you can add arbitrary tags to your items, you can define custom sets of tags for auto-completion, you can get a filtered view based on a tag search across multiple documents and so on (see for example http://sachachua.com/blog/2008/01/tagging-in-org-plus-bonus-code-for-timeclocks-and-tags/ http://sachachua.com/blog/2008/01/tagging-in-org-plus-bonus-...). In addition to tags, org-mod provides a second similar mechanism with properties (searchable key/value pairs annotations to your items). So org-mode definitely does not restrict you to a hierarchical organization. It is a very cool tool box that, coupled with the programmability of emacs, offers a lot of flexibility to adapt to your own way to do things.