6 ms·

There is a huge difference. It's proprietary, what I mean by that is you can't really edit it with anything else than Emacs. I used it with Spacemacs, and when

There is a huge difference. It's proprietary, what I mean by that is you can't really edit it with anything else than Emacs. I used it with Spacemacs, and when an upgrade broke it, I left with no notes... Very frustrating experience, I immedieately abandoned it when it happened. Never used org-mode since then.

confounded 8y ago
> It's proprietary, what I mean by that... That’s not what that means. I take your point in it being bound to Emacs however. Pandoc is an excellent tool for conversion though, and other editors are catching up quickly.
b3n 8y ago
It's not proprietary, it's still just plain text, and can be edited with anything. Emacs adds a lot of nice features on top of it to manipulate that text, but it's still just text. See http://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only/ http://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only/.
- Walkman 8y ago
  Yes, I have been fooled by the "oh it's just plain text" notion also and have regretted it. Did you try to actually open an org-mode file with anything else than Emacs? Did you try get any meaningful information out of it on a mobile phone or with an another editor? I did...
  - bpizzi 8y ago
    Take a look at Orgzly for interacting with org files on Android, and set up a dropbox shared folder between your devices, including your smartphone. Works well for me. As for extracting meaningful info with other editors, I would say it depends on how you structure your notes. For me it's just a very long bullet list with some tags here and there. So a plain text editor will only 'add' some star characters at the beginning of each lines, which appears quite readable to my eyes.
  - meiraleal 8y ago
    I've been opening org files with Atom, VS Code and inside Github without a problem.
    - dmach 8y ago
      Gogs renders well behaved org files also. The VS Code extension should get the update to allow folding soon. After that the Ctrl-c Ctrl-v crowd could use it nicely with Orgzly and Syncthing say bypassing Emacs until they need a full development environment. You could use Pandoc importing/exporting to other formats without Emacs. For note taking it's promising. Sharing to Orgzly on mobile captures a lot.
  - weavie 8y ago
    All the time. I'm curious as to what problems you were having? Obviously you won't be able to execute code blocks, reformat tables, follow links, fold sections etc.. but everything is just a search away..
  - tincholio 8y ago
    TBH, I wonder why you had to "leave without your notes", when pandoc eats org-mode for breakfast and gives you a multitude of target options, including markdown (and this is really after wondering what prevented you from using a fresh Emacs install, if you couldn't fix yours, to export them in the first place)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
xfer 8y ago
In that sense markdown is also proprietary, since you need some editor making things easy for you to manipulate and navigate the text document(that's all emacs does; even github renders org docs).
- kungtotte 8y ago
  Except Markdown looks like text with some special characters to embellish it a little. It's perfectly readable and legible in any text editor. Navigation is the only thing lacking, but manipulation is as easy as manipulating text is in your editor of choice. Note: I don't know what raw orgmode files look like, maybe they're similar to Markdown.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    They are. Org format is kind of a better and more powerful Markdown. As plaintext, it looks cleaner to me. The thing is, Org format is defined by the way Org-mode in Emacs handles it. Beyond Markdown-like features (which are rather easy to parse out; the format is similar), you get things in the data format that to date are handled only by Emacs. Think of Emacs + org mode as a better Jupyter notebooks than just editor for static text documents. Consider this note I have in my org file for work tasks. ** DONE [#A] Testing prior to syncup meeting :CUSTOMER_development: CLOSED: [2018-07-13 Fri 14:04] :LOGBOOK: CLOCK: [2018-07-13 Fri 12:14]--[2018-07-13 Fri 14:04] => 1:50 :END: - [X] Baseline test for REDACTED - REDACTED NOTE - [X] Baseline test for SOMETHING ELSE If you rendered this as a static document (e.g. export to HTML), you'd see the headline "Testing prior to syncup meeting", and the bullet-point list at the bottom. The remaining things are metadata, nicely formatted by Emacs (and partially hidden; e.g. :LOGBOOK: / :END: block starts folded by default). The metadata shown are part of Org-mode's task management aspect - the todo state (DONE), date of task's finalization, time clocking (CLOCK: entries), tags (CUSTOMER_development). Together, they enable me to very efficiently mange tasks, track spent time, and autogenerate invoice data. In this sense, org format is both a nice Markdown alternative, and - when coupled with Emacs - enables very powerful interactive documents that can handle task management, time clocking, literate programming, spreadsheeting, and other tasks. I suspect Org will never be as popular as Markdown simply because, if you wanted to go beyond Markdown feature parity, you'd have to reimplement half of Emacs to handle those "advanced" aspects.
jimjimjim 8y ago
what? it's plain text, you could read it with notepad.
orbital-decay 8y ago
Org-mode itself is an Emacs addon, so it's not surprising that you cannot run it without Emacs. Emacs and org-mode are much more stable and much less likely to die than any other software, and that's precisely why I'm using them for a decade already. The org-mode file format is plaintext, just like Markdown, and you definitely can edit and view it with any text editor. You will obviously lose the convenience of org-mode, though. Additionally, it's simple enough that you can easily implement a parser/importer for any other software.

confounded 8y ago

> It's proprietary, what I mean by that... That’s not what that means. I take your point in it being bound to Emacs however. Pandoc is an excellent tool for conversion though, and other editors are catching up quickly.

b3n 8y ago

It's not proprietary, it's still just plain text, and can be edited with anything. Emacs adds a lot of nice features on top of it to manipulate that text, but it's still just text. See http://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only/ http://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only/.

Walkman 8y ago
Yes, I have been fooled by the "oh it's just plain text" notion also and have regretted it. Did you try to actually open an org-mode file with anything else than Emacs? Did you try get any meaningful information out of it on a mobile phone or with an another editor? I did...
- bpizzi 8y ago
  Take a look at Orgzly for interacting with org files on Android, and set up a dropbox shared folder between your devices, including your smartphone. Works well for me. As for extracting meaningful info with other editors, I would say it depends on how you structure your notes. For me it's just a very long bullet list with some tags here and there. So a plain text editor will only 'add' some star characters at the beginning of each lines, which appears quite readable to my eyes.
- meiraleal 8y ago
  I've been opening org files with Atom, VS Code and inside Github without a problem.
  - dmach 8y ago
    Gogs renders well behaved org files also. The VS Code extension should get the update to allow folding soon. After that the Ctrl-c Ctrl-v crowd could use it nicely with Orgzly and Syncthing say bypassing Emacs until they need a full development environment. You could use Pandoc importing/exporting to other formats without Emacs. For note taking it's promising. Sharing to Orgzly on mobile captures a lot.
- weavie 8y ago
  All the time. I'm curious as to what problems you were having? Obviously you won't be able to execute code blocks, reformat tables, follow links, fold sections etc.. but everything is just a search away..
- tincholio 8y ago
  TBH, I wonder why you had to "leave without your notes", when pandoc eats org-mode for breakfast and gives you a multitude of target options, including markdown (and this is really after wondering what prevented you from using a fresh Emacs install, if you couldn't fix yours, to export them in the first place)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

xfer 8y ago

In that sense markdown is also proprietary, since you need some editor making things easy for you to manipulate and navigate the text document(that's all emacs does; even github renders org docs).

kungtotte 8y ago
Except Markdown looks like text with some special characters to embellish it a little. It's perfectly readable and legible in any text editor. Navigation is the only thing lacking, but manipulation is as easy as manipulating text is in your editor of choice. Note: I don't know what raw orgmode files look like, maybe they're similar to Markdown.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  They are. Org format is kind of a better and more powerful Markdown. As plaintext, it looks cleaner to me. The thing is, Org format is defined by the way Org-mode in Emacs handles it. Beyond Markdown-like features (which are rather easy to parse out; the format is similar), you get things in the data format that to date are handled only by Emacs. Think of Emacs + org mode as a better Jupyter notebooks than just editor for static text documents. Consider this note I have in my org file for work tasks. ** DONE [#A] Testing prior to syncup meeting :CUSTOMER_development: CLOSED: [2018-07-13 Fri 14:04] :LOGBOOK: CLOCK: [2018-07-13 Fri 12:14]--[2018-07-13 Fri 14:04] => 1:50 :END: - [X] Baseline test for REDACTED - REDACTED NOTE - [X] Baseline test for SOMETHING ELSE If you rendered this as a static document (e.g. export to HTML), you'd see the headline "Testing prior to syncup meeting", and the bullet-point list at the bottom. The remaining things are metadata, nicely formatted by Emacs (and partially hidden; e.g. :LOGBOOK: / :END: block starts folded by default). The metadata shown are part of Org-mode's task management aspect - the todo state (DONE), date of task's finalization, time clocking (CLOCK: entries), tags (CUSTOMER_development). Together, they enable me to very efficiently mange tasks, track spent time, and autogenerate invoice data. In this sense, org format is both a nice Markdown alternative, and - when coupled with Emacs - enables very powerful interactive documents that can handle task management, time clocking, literate programming, spreadsheeting, and other tasks. I suspect Org will never be as popular as Markdown simply because, if you wanted to go beyond Markdown feature parity, you'd have to reimplement half of Emacs to handle those "advanced" aspects.

jimjimjim 8y ago

what? it's plain text, you could read it with notepad.

orbital-decay 8y ago

Org-mode itself is an Emacs addon, so it's not surprising that you cannot run it without Emacs. Emacs and org-mode are much more stable and much less likely to die than any other software, and that's precisely why I'm using them for a decade already. The org-mode file format is plaintext, just like Markdown, and you definitely can edit and view it with any text editor. You will obviously lose the convenience of org-mode, though. Additionally, it's simple enough that you can easily implement a parser/importer for any other software.