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Org Mode syntax is one of the most reasonable markup languages for text (2017)

karl-voit.at

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Re: Org Mode syntax is one of the most reasonable markup languages for text (2017)

#131

Post by getnormality »

adityaathalye wrote: post #116
getnormality wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. Emacs folks often talk about how incredibly powerful and flexible their system is, so working with a reskinned Org Mode markup system when dealing with other people's stuff should be completely trivial for them, right? They should consider accommodating less technically sophisticated people for whom different notations are a bigger burden, no?

Your wish is our command... I'd argue that Emacs package maintainers care a lot about usability, in general. This extends to when they craft a package for general use. https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak "the complete audio desktop" by our blind and sight-impaired friends, for our blind and sight-impaired friends (and others who must necessarily use speech interfaces) https://github.com/pprevos/emacs-writing-studio…

Maybe I'll try it someday! I'm always up for an underrated, high quality life improvement technology.

Re: Org Mode syntax is one of the most reasonable markup languages for text (2017)

#132

Post by alexisread »

fipar wrote: post #57
rgoulter wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I don't think org-mode's babel features really exist in Markdown I think the neatest part of org-babel is the source code block execution, & the various ways it supports for configuring output. This allows for org files to be "plaintext notebooks" (like jupyter in plaintext"). -- It's really surprising that this part is not more common. More niche is the "babel" part of that: because the code blocks can take va…

I agree about the duct tape, which I also use often around the house, so maybe that's why I like org-babel :) Just wanted to say that I share data between different blocks in different languages through files and env variables (I add :session shared to the src blocks that need to access this). That is useful also to have src blocks you can execute repeatedly and that depend on something like an aws identity being ass…

I think this is the crux of the issue, use like this is like a real program, just built up incrementally in a notebook rather than a repl or shell-with-pipes, and with manual error handling. The STEPS project was all about this- a way of incrementally building blocks that can be composed.

With org mode in mind, ideally you would have language support for this ie. Comments are scoped metadata that can be formatted, tested, linked etc.

You need a well defined spec like djot as a DSL for this to work, so that parsers can be easily written for it. This level of language support allows many different views onto the source code. We’re not there yet.

Re: Org Mode syntax is one of the most reasonable markup languages for text (2017)

#133

Post by Groxx »

toolslive wrote: post #126
Groxx wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the claim that pypy has no spec, but cpython does? By that definition I think either both have a spec (they both use https://docs.python.org/3/reference/index.html and both are just "an implementation") or neither has one (since neither fully specifies all behavior and all modules, which is probably true for ~all languages).

No. The claim is cpython has no spec. The link you posted is about the language. The spec claim is about the behaviour of the runtime. The underlying claim is hat pypy cannot succeed precisely because there's no clear definition of success/compatibility/compliance. The situation is completely different in the Java world. There there is a specification for the memory model, runtime, aso and you can be sure that when y…

Gotcha. Broadly agreed then (Java is a very good counter-example), though I think pypy might be succeeding quite a bit more than org-mode in terms of users... and org-mode doesn't have a language spec either afaict. It has a fairly good description of the current code's parsing behavior, but the closest I've seen to something rigorous is https://github.com/200ok-ch/org-parser and even that's still unfinished from the readme (and it seems probably abandoned).

I haven't looked into the actual current state of things though, my last check was a couple years ago. I'd be pretty happy if things have changed, I just haven't seen any sign of that.

Re: Org Mode syntax is one of the most reasonable markup languages for text (2017)

#134

Post by vishnuharidas »

noahjk wrote: post #115
jameshart wrote: post #13

Sure. And driving on the left is one of the most reasonable sides of the road to drive on, but in a country where everyone drives on the right, it’s good to accept that, though driving on the left offers just as many advantages, nonetheless you shouldn’t insist on continuing to do so. Markdown is also one of the most reasonable markup languages to use for text, and it has won sufficient share that it should be your d…

I'm surprised nobody else brought it up - what are the pros of left-hand driving? Is it about where the controls are in relation to handedness? Some sort of safety benefit? Better visibility in certain scenarios? And are postal carriers in America who drive LLVs getting the _best_ or the _worst_ of both worlds? (I like to think about these sorts of things!)

I've driven both. Drove LHD for more than a decade in India. Now driving in RHD country for 2y now. Personally, I enjoy RHD more because I am right-handed and I get to do things easily with my RH. Otherwise, I realized that safety benefits comes from the driving discipline and not driving on a particular side of the road. Driving on Aus/Japan is way safer than India, despite all of them being LHD.

Re: Org Mode syntax is one of the most reasonable markup languages for text (2017)

#135

Post by d_sem »

durazabu wrote: post #61
d_sem wrote: post #50

And yet an accessible ecosystem of 3rd party non-emacs tooling has not been developed. I would pay big bucks for an obsidian-styled org-mode clone that had a no-frills GUI interface. I find org-modes task tracking, calendar, and agenda views top tier.

What do you think about my orgmode obsidian plugin? https://github.com/BBazard/obsidian-orgmode-cm6

very nice. Keep up the good work.

Re: Org Mode syntax is one of the most reasonable markup languages for text (2017)

#136

Post by adityaathalye »

Derbasti wrote: post #127

Expressing complex HTML or LaTeX constructs in org-mode is more complicated than writing the raw HTML or LaTeX. So for complex things, I'll always fall back to writing HTML or LaTeX directly. Markdown, instead, just falls back to HTML. Whatever I can't express in markdown, I can simply insert the HTML by hand. These markup languages are always fine for simple things, but have a hard time expressing more complicated t…

Opposite day! I moved from markdown (hugo) to org plaintext built and rendered using a hand-rolled pandoc + bash site maker. No Emacs needed.

~350 lines of Bash, and it hot-builds, and it hot-reloads :)

https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite (README has GIF demos, and explains the design of the code)

Also, I use literal HTML exports in my org files, like this:

  #+begin_export html
  
    
    
      
      (thanks, Buttondown!)
    
  
  #+end_export
Which is neat, because when I `C-'` (M-x org-edit-special), it opens a temporary buffer with just the HTML, with the relevant syntax-aware editing mode turned on. This has been a killer feature for me, because there are many places where I want /specific/ HTML, and neither org-export nor pandoc will compile org plaintext the way I want (not unless I invest inordinate amounts of time futzing with templating systems). So I just hand-code HTML using those export blocks, and I'm /fine/.

There are also a couple of places where I use org-babel to call a shell script that updates an exported HTML block in-line. I use this trick to tweak a common HTML fragment (like email form) in one place and expand it into custom HTML, wherever I need to.

Ditto LaTeX, although I confess, I'm not a heavy user, so I almost certainly haven't faced the troubles you have. With HTML, however, I think what I have is just cromulent.

Re: Org Mode syntax is one of the most reasonable markup languages for text (2017)

#137

Post by phyzix5761 »

diego898 wrote: post #73

Will a full complete org mode ever come to vim? A man can hope… Edit: I wonder if the vim community can contribute to a feature bounty like this? Hmm

I added Evil Mode to my emacs and never went back to vim except for some quick edits in the terminal.

Re: Org Mode syntax is one of the most reasonable markup languages for text (2017)

#138

Post by skeledrew »

jameshart wrote: post #111
skeledrew wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Org is essentially the parent of _all_ other plaintext formats, and is able to treat them specifically at the native level. So for example there's a single command to run a code block, but the code runner is correctly resolved. And multiple blocks in different languages can communicate with each other. Entire projects can be placed in a single org files and still operate as though they're separate files. Literate pro…

The argument being made is not ‘org-mode is a reasonable alternative to a filesystem for organizing textual files’, it is ‘org-mode is a reasonable lightweight textual markup language’. The fact you can replace entire project and documentation systems with org-mode is not an argument in favor of its lightweight text markup.

Yet text markup doesn't exist in a vacuum, heavy or light. Text is marked up in the first place so it can be better processed by a computer, while keeping it reasonably readable by humans. And there are a variety of markup formats out there as some given person gets the idea that doing it X way makes it most ideal for both use cases. Org-mode is a extremely lightweight, likely more so than md, AND allows for complex levels of processing WHILE maintaining that lightweightedness. The feature variety already exist as proof, at least in Emacs.

Re: Org Mode syntax is one of the most reasonable markup languages for text (2017)

#139

Post by alexisread »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #14
least wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Babel features are kind of a moot point if you’re just talking about the syntax, which seems to be the purpose of the post. Most of the reason to use org mode is tied to emacs. There’s no reason you couldn’t do something similar with markdown code blocks if someone were so inclined. But that’s tool dependent, not syntax. I sort of agree with Karl’s point about there being too many standards of markdown, but I doubt o…

Well, but I am not aware of anyone having come up with a good syntax to do babel things in Markdown. Markdown and Org Mode also set out to serve different purposes. For a quick and dirty text Markdown might suffice, but the babel stuff and spreadsheet stuff enable a lot of use cases that Markdown simply doesn't cater to. We already have the implementation of all these nice things in Emacs. If we were to replicate the…

I agree you would need to specify the markdown to allow more implementations. https://github.com/jgm/djot Would make a good DSL inside languages, combine that with compile-time execution so that blocks can auto-recalculate and you have a more available mechanism than emacs/org in other languages.

Re: Org Mode syntax is one of the most reasonable markup languages for text (2017)

#140

Post by exe34 »

leobg wrote: post #53
skeledrew wrote: post #17

I discovered and started using org-mode (and, as a result, Emacs) when I migrated from Evernote in '16. Today I use it for all my project, task and knowledge management needs, with some files going over 15MB in size. And I'm still loving it. Started out with headers only, and every time I wanted something more, it was always just there for the taking. Easy to use, and also crazy powerful. Can't think of anything else…

How do you handle PDFs, images, HTML/rich text snippets? Asking because Evernote supported all of those. It’s what keeps me using that app, even though I cringe every time I open it.

you can show images in org. https://orgmode.org/manual/Images.html

with webpages I just store the link, but maybe you want to download them? I've used singlefile extension to download and store copies and link from org.

with pdf I just store evince /path.pdf & and triple click to select and middle click in a terminal.

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