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If you're looking at it purely as an interchange format for pretty documents, no. However, once you think about actually using it, the tooling for the format is
by saulrh 9y ago
If you're looking at it purely as an interchange format for pretty documents, no. However, once you think about actually using it, the tooling for the format is fantastically more powerful. A small selection of some of the standouts:
Emacs' better understanding of the structure gives you much better editing; I have chords for operations like "move this item up/down" and "promote/demote this item", plus excellent folding, jumping, and a measure of intellisense-like functionality.
org-babel can do anything that even looks like literate programming. I make regular use of both its notebook functionality (like ipython) and its more traditional features (compile to a documentation part and a code part), and its integration with emacs lets you do things like pop out to edit a code block in its native mode as if it were a little tiny file.
org-agenda and org-todo use the format's support for rich semantic metadata to do anything you could want from a calendar, bug tracker, organizer, note-taker, or list manager. You can tag your items with indexed keywords, arbitrary and even simultaneous to-do workflows, and arbitrary (and I do mean arbitrary, it's emacs and everything can be an elisp snippet) to-do deadlines and recurrences. And all that data isn't just a wash; a wealth of options exist for slicing and dicing your data in any number of ways, high-level overview or detailed statistics.
And on top of all that, you can render org-mode documents to nearly any markup under the sun! I regularly compose documents in org, using all of this power, and export to markdown or html to publish.
- roryisok 9y agoBut it really sounds like you're telling me about things Emacs can do. If I don't use Emacs, what advantage does org mode hold for me? This link is for org mode in vscode, which I do use, but from what I can see it doesn't do any of that fancy stuff there?
- tomsthumb 9y agoThose are not things that emacs does outside the context of org mode. From your comment, the implementation of org mode in vscode sounds sparse. This is not a deficit in org mode but rather the implementation.
- saulrh 9y agoYes, if you're not using emacs you don't get much from the format itself. Which is why everyone talks about org-mode, not the file format. That said, available libraries matter when you're choosing a programming language, and interop and available integrations matter when you're choosing, say, a bug tracker; why wouldn't the available editing tools matter when you're choosing a calendar+agenda+literate-programming environment+note-taker+organizer? I'd almost say that a "mode" for editing org-mode files almost doesn't deserve to be called "org-mode for X" if it doesn't do all the fancy stuff. It'd be like calling telnet a gmail client because you can theoretically negotiate an SSL handshake by hand - yes, but that's not the point. I think that people came into this thread hoping for a vscode extension that does everything that emacs org-mode does, but I don't think that that's something that'll happen, unfortunately, not unless vscode's architectural philosophy is very different from what I expect.