Wow. That's similar in vein to the project I've been working on slowly on the side for about a month now: http://bulletxt.com - it currently saves your notes via browser session but I'm working on making it like pastebin and having an account system. It'll be very much like a typical text-editor with the ability to sort tasks via drag-drop, copy-paste, and share task subtrees.
I highly doubt the emacs-type will end up using my app but it feels good to see I'm not the only one who has a need for organizing nested todo lists. I can't for the life of me figure out how everyone can deal with 1-level deep task lists.
So I love the web app. Super simple (especially with the keyboard shortcuts). Let me know when you have a login & saved lists will ya? Email in my profile.
You would be able to create pages (tabs) and organize them. You can create tasks and subtasks within them. Press 'tab' to indent (i.e. make a subtask). And when you want a task+subtasks out of your mind & sight, click the [-] or press [`] key to hide. There will be a 'completed tasks' list for each page with some started/completion date info. I might put some deadline/highlight/bold options per task but haven't thought about it fully yet.
It will vaguely do GTD like you put it but I don't think it will be a vitalist.com or even a simplegtd.com replacement. I don't think GTD itself is perfect and wrote untodos.com a year ago with 'today/soon/whenever' sections to help sort my life but it wasn't enough. What I really wanted was a place to immediately jot down my thoughts without any hassle when I was brainstorming and later sort them when I'm in a more organized mood. Hence there is no 'save' button in bulletxt (though you will have unlimited undo.)
However, there's a few general issues I'd like to see improved upon:
* External Collaboration (how can I get my PM to work with me on org-mode docs?) - Something like ikiwiki that works back and forth between web edits and emacs edits.
* Searching - Ideally, this would be part of the external collaboration piece. Spotlight/rgrep is ok for now, but not great.
* Easier linking/file creation - I'd love for org-mode to incorporate some of ideas/features in VoodooPad/Tomboy for easily creating new docs and linking to them. Could probably hack something together (and I have made a shortcut for file-links that uses ido-completion), but it'd be nice for this to be a central focus.
It's strange, but a simple text file always served my needs for TODO lists, even including notes and other information related to the TODOs. It is not pretty, but I do not have trouble finding my TODOs amidst the rest of the noise, since I am consistent with my left-side "start of a TODO line" and "start of a subTODO" symbols. Sometimes I think that having a neat, pretty TODO list program would be nice, but I learned that I find my text files much more portable (Notes on iPhone, a txt on Mac, txt in linux, txt on my Windows desktop).
According to a Google Tech Talk by the creator, a few people have switched from vi to emacs to get org-mode. The obvious implication is that there is nothing comparable for vi. However, the talk was in July of 2008, so maybe someone has created something since then.
I used vi/vim for about fifteen years before playing around with org-mode (and magit and a few other tools). After that, I felt like I'd been missing out on a lot of useful stuff.
That was about a year ago. I'm still fluent in vi (which I use sometimes), but I can get far more done far more quickly in emacs.
And I track it in org-mode. :) (which also has a view of my current google and exchange calendars and automatically saves all edits in a git repo and pushes it off my box for synchronization/backup/history).
In my extensive searches, there is nothing like it anywhere, running on anything. Without exaggeration, org-mode changed the way I organize my life, both at work and at home. It has a blindingly fast development pace, is already very mature, and is much more than just todo, calendar, and outlining.
I've been working on a todo list app for vim, loosely based on org mode. It doesn't cover many of org mode's features right now, but if you want to take a look anyway, the source is at http://git.mivok.net/gitweb/?p=vimtodo.git;a=summary
I highly doubt the emacs-type will end up using my app but it feels good to see I'm not the only one who has a need for organizing nested todo lists. I can't for the life of me figure out how everyone can deal with 1-level deep task lists.