I have always wanted to learn Org Mode, but at the same time I have been trying to learn emacs (spacemacs) and this has been a bit complex and my interested has fallen quickly.
Any ideas or resources on learning org mode? Can it be used with ex. IntelliJ? Should I learn first plain emacs then orgmode? Or should I look into other note taking tools
About a year ago bit the bullet and learned emacs, mostly for org-mode because of all great reviews. I made it my primary editor for about 6 months, which forced me to become familiar with it.
Now I've dropped it and I'm back to vscode and Roam as my life management system. Maybe the time I gave it was too short, but I didn't feel like org-mode or emacs made me more productive - the opposite. I spent so much time fiddling with configuration options, trying to understand elisp, finding the right emacs/org-mode packages, and so on. Yeah, these things felt productive, but in the end they were are a waste of time that got in the way of getting work done. Also, let's not talk about the time where emacs just crashed and lost several hours of work. Apparently the default config (I used Doom) didn't think it was important to handle that case.
Perhaps things are different once you've use Emacs for 5+ years and are intimately with its ecosystem and packages. So, if you decide to go that route, it's a long-term investment. Don't expect any productivity gains soon.
And honestly, even after using org-mode for 6 months for pretty much everything in my life, I didn't think it was that great. Yeah, it's pretty good, but I don't think it quite lives up to the religious hype it gets from some users. People are going to downvote me for saying this, but IMO org-mode is a pretty neat but outdated piece of technology with most of its following coming from people who grew up with it and have used it for 10+ years. The power comes from their familiarity with it, not from org-mode itself. It's not that great.
What is Roam? I see someone else in this thread mentioned org-roam, but that seems tied to Emacs?
Because of it's popularity someone created an org-mode package called org-roam [1] that does some of the things that roam does, but in emacs. These are not officially related though.