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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)

#181

Post by grogenaut »

tialaramex wrote: post #38
babarock wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting I should pick the markup format for my private files according to the perceived popularity of another format? I'm not sure what's your point. Are you telling people who use org-mode that they shouldn't?

One of the advantages of "going with the flow" when you can is that you benefit from numbers. You're a market of one, but by "going with the flow" the total market is huge. Even if for me personally 185V mains power would be better, I can't buy gear for 185V, none of the electricians around here know how to work with it, the cables and sockets and everything else are defined around the prevailing systems at 220-250V…

bro we're talking about text formats for organizational skills not justifying public nudity

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

#182

Post by da_chicken »

adityaathalye wrote: post #74
crazygringo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but I think it's safe to say Markdown has more interoperability, no? Yes you can always use pandoc, but conversion usually brings quirks of its own. And more generally, the less conversion steps you need, the better. If you just stick to vanilla markup, you don't encounter incompatibilities. The "many kinds of markdown" isn't an issue if you're not using platform-specific extensions in the first place. Which, u…

Yes, more interoperability at the cost of capability. Also, yes, conversion is quirky. That is why Org works until it does, and then I trade off being stymied by markdown's more plain-ness, in favour of collaborating with others. And with vanilla markup, the trouble is that many applications /do not/ use just vanilla markup. People /invariably/ want "one key tweak" (like, front-matter or table of contents or footnote…

> Yes, more interoperability at the cost of capability.

Well, then why aren't you using LaTeX? Isn't that more capable?

> And with vanilla markup, the trouble is that many applications /do not/ use just vanilla markup. People /invariably/ want "one key tweak"

And, that's going to be true as someone adopts it outside of Emacs, right?

Surely, someone will decide that the way Org Mode is doing something is wrong, right? They're going to do something like say, "Hey, why don't we permit Markdown style headings, too?" or something similar.

Or are you suggesting Org Mode military police? Felony markup possession?

There's nothing special about Org Mode that makes it immune to the problems you're describing. They will happen immediately upon wider adoption.

And if you somehow do stop it, well, it's tech. If you don't have a patent on it then someone will fork the idea and you'd have Borg Mode directly competing with you anyways.

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

#183

Post by spankibalt »

tconfrey wrote: post #117

I've been on this bandwagon for a long time! I proposed org as an interchange format for Productivity and PKM tools several years ago [0]. Org allows me to unify my bookmark manager with the rest of my PKM as well as to-do management in a way that I don't think is possible with markdown. That said I think that AI is changing things as it becomes best practice to document and define everything in plain text for LLM co…

> "Either way I think the losers are going to be [...] maybe even wikis, ie all the non standard ways people have been documenting their work to date."

Org mode never touched ConnectedText for me; I'd probably still use it if the tool either had gotten open-sourced and/or taken over by a dedicated team (of professionals). Its pros were user friendlieness, powerful scripting, reliability, having an extremely good search functionality, and a small but dedicated community. In other words some things Org mode still has not. And getting text in and out was trivial.

Sadly, AFAIK, the dev threw in the towel after facing a refactorization of the code. Having single-dev complex applications is very seldom a sign of sustainability (SPOF).

And functioning wikis obviously implement standards; several of them can run on flat-file structures (e. g. TiddlyWiki). Org mode can or could run them as front-end. Et cetera.

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

#184

Post by sroerick »

golem14 wrote: post #180
hahajk wrote: post #11

For me the thing keeping me on markdown is Obsidian on mobile - no other note taking app comes close. If they made an actual Emacs for mobile (actual emacs complete with elisp support, not the existing org mode apps) that was a pleasure to use, I would likely switch to that. As it is, the * vs # for headings makes switching between the two uncomfortable.

Btw, which other note taking apps worth talking about exist? I am aware of org-roam and scimax (?) and both look promising but I find that (at least for org-roam) there’s not enough big picture explaining what is going on behind the curtains. That somewhat discouraged me from spending a lot of time with it, but a quick glance did look promising.

org-roam is a very small and stable codebase, worth reading on its own simply for education, but I also find that if you're interested in the internals, it's pretty accessible.

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

#185

Post by lelanthran »

maximus-decimus wrote: post #145
jasperry wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value of Org outside Emacs would be the same value that Markdown has, if it had wider adoption. Voit's post makes a strong argument for Org syntax's ability to serve for all the things Markdown currently does, while being more consistent and concise than Markdown, and so he pushes for it to be more widely adopted. We know that in tech, the better format doesn't always win at first, or ever, but we can advocate!

org-mode is just much more complicated to implement though and just contains so much. it's also a todo app. It also lets you run code like a python notebook. it can show you your tasks in a calendar. I've used "org-mode" todo apps on android, but people complain they can't really use it because it doesn't implement everything. The advantage of the core markdown syntax is that you know it works everywhere and it works…

> org-mode is just much more complicated to implement though and just contains so much.

So just implement the features it has in common with Markdown and add the rest as and when people ask for them.

For me, org-mode syntax is just that much more intuitive than Markdown. I sometimes feel that when devs invent something (Markdown, YAML, etc), they really should do 5 minutes of research before inventing their thing.

Markdown should have used all the org-mode syntax for the the features they wanted.

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

#186

Post by kleinishere »

cyrialize wrote: post #159
kleinishere wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve looked into a log/journal date tree approach with my various activities across the day (meeting notes, independent work notes, etc) under the date. But then I prefer being able to look through headings that anchor on context first, then dates second (/eventually). Does your daily log link to other parts of one org file, or other org files? I’ve asked LLMs their opinions. But curious for yours! Also thinking abou…

My daily log file basically looks like this: * Year * Month ** Day For example: * 2025 * January ** Saturday 01/10/26 In each day heading I'll have either a short note (like saying what meeting happened), or a link to a separate org file. I keep an org file for each JIRA ticket I'm working on, so I'll link it out there. The presence of a link indicates that I've worked on that ticket that day. Then in each individual…

This makes a ton of sense - thank you for taking the time to write it out like that. Crystal clear. It’s somewhat different than what I’m solving for and that’s reassuring to see!

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

#187

Post by amake »

Spivak wrote: post #82
thetemp_ wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> approximately nothing else supports it. That's simply not true. There are numerous android and iOS apps that support it. There are implementations for Vim and other editors besides Emacs. GitHub supports it, for example. I have not found a satisfactory (to me) solution for note-taking in Markdown that is open-source, plain-text, and mobile-friendly with local (non-cloud) sync. (Except for maybe Logseq, which appear…

I've used those apps and the problem is that they only support a tiny subset of the format, and they can't support any of the features that require the rest of emacs to be present which is a lot of of the value. If you're okay with the stripped down version that's basically markdown but different and that's fine but I feel like most people fall in love with org mode because it's so powerful once you get it going and…

Creator of Orgro here.

> they only support a tiny subset of the format

I think Orgro's parser[0] is pretty complete at this point. If you can find an Org syntax that Orgro doesn't support, please let me know.

However I should be very clear here:

> they can't support any of the features that require the rest of emacs to be present which is a lot of of the value

This is absolutely true and unlikely to change anytime soon. As I'm sure you know, parsing the syntax correctly is not at all the same as supporting all of the features built on top of the AST.

[0]: https://github.com/amake/org_parser

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

#188

Post by setopt »

lelanthran wrote: post #185
maximus-decimus wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

org-mode is just much more complicated to implement though and just contains so much. it's also a todo app. It also lets you run code like a python notebook. it can show you your tasks in a calendar. I've used "org-mode" todo apps on android, but people complain they can't really use it because it doesn't implement everything. The advantage of the core markdown syntax is that you know it works everywhere and it works…

> org-mode is just much more complicated to implement though and just contains so much. So just implement the features it has in common with Markdown and add the rest as and when people ask for them. For me, org-mode syntax is just that much more intuitive than Markdown. I sometimes feel that when devs invent something (Markdown, YAML, etc), they really should do 5 minutes of research before inventing their thing. Ma…

Markdown was based on the "syntax" already being used informally in emails and on IRC. So the author did do some searching to define the syntax.

I don’t like many parts of markdown either (like the syntax for bold), but those were also IIRC already being parsed by some IRC clients before Markdown was specified.

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

#189

Post by vga42 »

IshKebab wrote: post #157
vga42 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Can anyone tell me an actual reason to use Org mode over Markdown? I think the reason in general is simply that org-mode is better, i.e. more carefully defined. I'll mention the things I like more specifically: - Link syntax in markdown is something I never remember how it goes. Org-mode is [[link][description]]. - Text styles in org-mode make more sense. In markdown, * is used for italics, * for bold. Additionally,…

> Link syntax in markdown is something I never remember how it goes I can remember it fairly easily. [Link](url). Very unconvinced by this. > Text styles in org-mode make more sense. In markdown, * is used for italics, * for bold. Additionally, * is for lists, which might be confusing. * for lists is what I would naturally use so I think that's better than - (but Markdown actually supports both). I'll give you * for…

> Sorry but there's no way #BEGIN_xxx is better than ```

Ok, I can give you that as a subjective thing you might have.

> or 4-space indent.

Ok, you saying this practically invalidates every single opinion you have on everything. So thanks for playing, I won.

Seriously though, you don't have to like org.

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

#190

Post by internet_points »

tconfrey wrote: post #117

I've been on this bandwagon for a long time! I proposed org as an interchange format for Productivity and PKM tools several years ago [0]. Org allows me to unify my bookmark manager with the rest of my PKM as well as to-do management in a way that I don't think is possible with markdown. That said I think that AI is changing things as it becomes best practice to document and define everything in plain text for LLM co…

llm's handle org-mode just fine in my experience. It's not like there's a dearth of org-mode to train on on the internet.
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